Electronic Correspondence (Sending via 3rd Party)

Correspondence such as referral/reply letters can be sent to and received from other doctors electronically via a third party into Genie. This third party could be an organisation such as Healthlink or direct through the Genie Solutions Web Server. The following sections will explain both methods.

Healthlink is a company which acts as a “middle man” for the secure storage and forwarding of encrypted letters between doctors, and for pathology and X-ray results for some providers.

To send letters via Healthlink, both doctors must have the Healthlink client application installed on a computer on their network, and both must have a Healthlink EDI. The EDI is usually an 8 character identifier, which is basically the name of your mailbox on the Healthlink server.

The Healthlink Client application is cross-platform, so this can be used on either Windows or Macintosh computers.

In a nutshell, Doctor A writes a letter to Doctor B. The letter is exported from Genie in HL7 format, and includes Doctor B’s EDI. The Healthlink Client application picks up the letter, encrypts it, and sends it to Doctor B’s mailbox on the Healthlink server. Doctor B uses the Healthlink Client application to retrieve any letters in his mailbox.

These are then imported into his practice management program, which should also produce an acknowledgement (ACK) that the letter has been received. This ACK is uploaded to Doctor A’s mailbox, and is downloaded the next time Doctor A launches the Healthlink Client application. Genie imports the ACK, and marks the original letter as having been received.

This can all be set up to happen seamlessly so that there is virtually no interaction required by the end users.

Setup

Note: Genie also supports the following 3rd Party Providers:

To configure one of these above programs to work with Genie, substitute 'Healthlink' with the name of the program as listed above.

If your provider is Healthlink, EQuery or DivisionReport, enter the Carrier Identifier assigned to you by this provider in your Practice Preferences record in Genie. See Carrier Identifiers for more details.

On the computer on which the Healthlink Client application is installed, create a folder inside the Genie folder and name it “Healthlink”. Inside this folder, create another two folders named “Incoming” and “Outgoing”.

Limitations:

1)        Only one instance of Healthlink can be running on the network

2)        The "Incoming" and "Outgoing" folders must not exist on the server

3)        There must not be more than one "Incoming" and "Outgoing" folder on the network

If Healthlink is running on the server, you will need to consider moving it to a client machine, where you would create the appropriate "Incoming" and "Outgoing" folders.

Configure the Healthlink program to use these two folders for it's correspondence.