MedLink EHR

MedLink TotalOffice is CCHIT 2008 Certified and supports immunization practice in several ways:

• Forecasts based on the ACIP schedule to give alerts to physicians about what immunizations are due on a particular patient.
• MedLink can sent immunization updates using a Continuity of Care Record (CCR).
  
• MedLinks is looking to do bi-directional HL7 with registries but are hampered by lack of support by their client's registries.

The last point is very important to note. MedLink is very interested in working with registries and would like to add better support. But they are being held back because registries are not ready to work with them. MedLink is not alone in facing this problem. Here are some of the issues I've seen:

1. There are some registries that still do not support HL7. And many of those that do have significant functional limits.
   
2. There are local variations on what messages mean, how they are constructed, how they are interpreted, and how they are transported.

These problems are not insurmountable. The commonalities between registry interfaces is actually quite high but most vendors do not have enough registry knowledge to determine what is a local variation and what is done in the rest of the US. This is probably something that AIRA needs to address.