If an HL7 feed is not adhering to the HL7 and/or text encoding standard, upgrading to OnBase 22.1 may pose an issue as HL7 Messages outside of these standards will by default send negative acknowledgements (NACKs). There are options available which will allow the upgrade to take place, based on the following behavior:
Messages are being sent to OnBase with non-UTF-8 Data
- Address the behavior upstream from OnBase
- The sending system or HL7 interface engine addresses characters that are not encoded with UTF-8 by changing the character encoding to UTF-8. This is the preferred and recommended option for addressing this behavior.
UTF-8 encoded messages are being sent to OnBase with non-ASCII characters while using an ANSI database
- Convert the OnBase Database to use Unicode Encoding
- This is the preferred and recommended long term option if there is sufficient time before an upgrade to OnBase 22.1 and it is a requirement for the system to support characters outside of the ASCII character set.
- Address the behavior upstream from OnBase
- The originating system may limit what is input or sent via HL7 to only contain ASCII characters. The HL7 Interface Engine may also identify and handle HL7 Messages which are outside the ASCII character set. If non-ASCII characters are found in the message, ASCII characters could be substituted before sending the message to OnBase.