Practical Guidance for Managing Hepatitis B and C Lab Result Notes with HL7 Feeds

Health Level 7 (HL7) feeds are vital for transmitting laboratory data to public health surveillance systems. While results are often successfully transmitted and integrated, important notes or comments associated with lab hepatitis B and C results can provide critical context, yet they can be underutilized or missing. These additional notes can offer essential context for accurate classifying hepatitis cases and public health action.

This document is intended to support hepatitis surveillance staff in working collaboratively with their informatics team to identify, retrieve, and integrate lab result interpretation notes within HL7 messages and incorporate them into the surveillance system. By strengthening the use of hepatitis result interpretative notes, surveillance programs can improve data completeness, enhance case classification accuracy, support the building of the Hepatitis C Continuum of Care (also called a Care Cascade), and better inform public health programing.