It is important that third-party medical applications can download patient demographic data from the hospital's main Patient Administration System (PAS). Unisoft offers four techniques.

Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)

The best and fastest way to download data. The user just types in the patient's hospital number, or scans the patient's bar code, and the patient's details are downloaded in a fraction of a second.

TCP/IP

Just as fast as ODBC, this technique allows low-level calls usually to proprietary Interface Engines.

HL7 Messaging

This is an industry standard messaging system that allows request for data to be transferred between disparate systems that are not ODBC-compliant.

Flat file transfer

Several Patient Administration System have report generators. These can be used to create plain text files containing demographic data in a regular layout. The Unisoft applications can be configured to pick up data from these files.

Screen-scrape

A less sophisticated approach for PAS systems that cannot support any of the above techniques. It requires a terminal emulator that can continuously capture data appearing in the terminal window and save it to a file on the hard disk.

Click the name of the PAS on the right to see a list of hospitals with Unisoft interfaces and the technique used.