the admission and expected discharge for the patient etc in the table shown in fig4 the patient data 60 includes fields for additional patient visit information 68 merge fields 70 for identifying previous patient identification numbers for the patient as well as clinical data fields and customized fields related to the specific health care facility 72 alternatively the patient data received from the health care facility admissions department can be retrieved formatted and stored for use of the bed management system 10 using various other methods and configurations thus the fig2 4 should be understood as only exemplary representations of the system and methods of the present invention an interface 58 is used to process the xml data 60 and store the data 60 in the database 20 for use by the bed management system 10 fig5 illustrates the fields of the database 20 the interface 58 also stores date and time information for the processed hl7 message in a process file not shown if the message is flawed or an error occurred during the transmission or processing of the message the interface 58 is configurable to record the error and transmit an appropriate notification thereof to appropriate administrators for the adt system 14 or the bed management system 10 of the present invention referring.