Semantic need of Acknowledgements

[jkiddo]

From the description on https://medcomdk.github.io/dk-medcom-acknowledgement/ - "it shall be acknowledged with a MedCom Acknowledgement message, stating if the transfer was successful and the message validated correctly or not. In other words, does a MedCom Acknowledgement message hold information about how delivery of a message went." it primarily sounds like this is a task for the VANS network to handle - being that the syntactical parts of the message are adheared to. I don't see anything in the description that mentions semantic validity implying that the task of sending acknowledgements really should be a task for VANS - not the application. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see the need for the Acknowledgements when using FHIR as the message bearing format.

[jkiddo]

Add to that: Under what conditions are Negative Acknowledgements allowed? If an unsolicited message is sent to a system and it is a precondition/business rule for that system that the communication was originally initated from that system; Is it then allowed to respond with a Negative Acknowledgement since it would violate the rules of the system?

[jkiddo]

Put in other words: Is it legal to return a negative acknowledgement if the contents of the message does not fit business requirements of the receiving system?

[jkiddo]

@ovi-medcom / @tmsMedcom ?

[tmsMedcom]

Sorry - I wasn't aware that you'd raised the issue.
Acknowledgements are send by the receiving system, when a message is received and validated. When to send a negative acknowledgement is described on the governance for messaging: https://medcomdk.github.io/MedCom-FHIR-Communication/assets/documents/040_Governance4FHIR-Messaging.html#7-fhir-messaging-acnowledgement-rules and in the use cases: https://medcomdk.github.io/dk-medcom-messaging/Generelle%20tekniske%20use%20cases%20v1.0.0.pdf.

[jkiddo]

I don't think any of those pages describes if the content of the message is deemed unfit for businesss rules purposes, or am I reading it wrong?

[tmsMedcom]

Sending a negative Acknowledgement when a message doesn't fit certain business rules is not a part of the scope.

Requiring positive Acknowledgements is an upgrade from the existing flow of receipts, where a sending application cannot expect to receive a positive receipt.

[jkiddo]

So its a transmission level acknowledgement - not a business level acknowledgement?

[tmsMedcom]

Yes, from sender to receiver application.

[jkiddo]

Is it safe to assume that the VANS provider will validate the message according to the IG and according to standard FHIR syntactical rules?

[tmsMedcom]

The VANS provider will only forward the message to the receiver, not validate it.

[jkiddo]

If they neither provides acknowledgements nor validation what is then their task? If the message cannot even be parsed why are they allowed to forward it?

[tmsMedcom]

Their task is to ensure that a message is send to the right receiver. Further, the VANS providers return a negative VANSEnvelope receipt (XCTL01) if they cannot parse the VANSEnvelope to the right receiver, e.g. the GLN is unknown.

[jkiddo]

Okay - yes, I can see that from http://svn.medcom.dk/svn/releases/Standarder/Den%20gode%20VANSEnvelope/Dokumentation/Den%20gode%20VANSEnvelope.pdf now. I would probably have done it differently.

[jkiddo]

Is it acceptable for receiving application to respond with a bouncing FHIR CareCommunication message if the message originally sent does not make sense in the receiving end?