On Thursday 27 April 2006 00:01, Andrew Patterson wrote: > Yes, but that's polling one account (or maybe 5 accounts for those > with lots of accounts) using POP.. the actual delivery of the email > to my mailbox is not done with polling but by the sending mail > server pushing it to my account using SMTP.. I think Ross' point was that > it is impractical to poll every medical facility in australia looking for > pertinent results, much the same way I don't poll every > POP server on the internet hunting for my email..
No, no, nooooo! A service provider *emails* the result to a service requester. The service requester only polls his mail account(s) So simple. I have more than a hundred accounts. Most of them are serviced by software "robots", e.g a dedicated account for pathology results from Mayne health. A script polls that account, decrypts the downloaded message, and slots the decrypted content into our EHR. Another dedicated email account exists for specialist reports. The script polls the account, downloads the message, decrypts, verifies signature, and slots the processed message into our EHR. And so forth. Adding and customizing a new script takes some 10 minutes, because we have no standards for data formats, cryptography etc. I still have to manually set up data format (PIT, HL7, plain text ...), parsing patient information, chosing crypto method (S/MIME w/ OpenPGP or X.509 etc., OpenPGP encrypted attachment, ...) and so forth. If we simply agreed on a) email s transport format b) HL7 version x.y as defined in AS xyz as data format c) X.509 or OpenPGP as cryptographic format almost all my communication problems would have been solved - simple, efficient, cheap, no need for any middle men, no need for expensive custom software, no need for breaking standards. The last step towards informational paradise would then be standard encoding of information ... Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
