At 10:44 am +1000 11/5/06, Andrew Patterson wrote:
[...]Obviously as a company that has invested heavily
in HL7v2, you guys are keen to push Hl7 (as is
your right). I don't want to put you in the position of
having to defend the whole of HL7 by yourself, but I
was wondering if you had any thoughts on this
issue and whether you think its a problem, or whether
I've completely misunderstood HL7 as a standard??
Andrew
HL7 V2 was cobbled together by industry participants in the late
1980's who wanted to achieve interoperability, but naturally nobody
wanted to throw away their existing technology investments. The
result is a lot of "flexibility", similar to early IT hardware
standards that didn't talk (eg S100bus, RS232).
(In comparison, M$ uses dominant market power to enforce conformance
with its whims.)
Australian implementation standards for HL7 go a significant way to
reducing the variablity in HL7 implementations in this country.
IHE is an attempt to reduce HL7 variability in the USA and elsewhere.
HL7 V3 goes a long way to eliminating variability, but this is no
small task and real implementations are sparse.
The major advantage of HL7 is industry participation - there are
hundreds of participants working together towards a common goal.
Standardisation is informed by implementation.
Ian.
--
Dr Ian R Cheong, BMedSc, FRACGP, GradDipCompSc, MBA(Exec)
Health Informatics Consultant, Brisbane, Australia
Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(for urgent matters, please send a copy to my practice email as well:
[EMAIL PROTECTED])
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