Gap Analysis

Gap analysis is an HL7 interface scoping activity. When you build an HL7 interface, before jumping into the code, you need to understand what data you are going to play with. Most importantly, you need to understand the differences between source and destination systems at the messaging level. Before jumping into integration engine configuration, you need to know what to configure. Some of your questions are likely to include the following:

• Are there any differences between the message structures in each system?  If so, what are they?
• Are there any mandatory data elements on one side that are optional on the other?  If so, what are they?
• Do both systems use the same code sets? Are they the same values?  Which values do I need to map?
• Is the data semantically consistent? In other words, does the meaning or significance of an element always match across both systems?

These are often challenging questions to answer.

The Gap Analysis functionality in Conformance helps you identify these differences in a matter of a few seconds. Gap Analysis enables the following:

• List message, segment, field, and code set gaps between 2 profiles
• List these gaps between a profile and a set of HL7 messages
• Share the list of gaps with the project team
• Export the list of gaps to an Excel document