Brian,
thanks for your encouraging response. As for your own project, please
note that I was explicitly refering to HL7 version 3 data
types. Version 3 will be a lot nicer than version 2 is today, but it
will also need some time unitl it is completed and widely used. So, if
you want to build a system with HL7 interfaces for today's market, you
will have to stick with HL7 v2 for another while. Version 3 is coming
along nicely and we will see huge breaktroughs by year end and early
2000. But before HL7 version 3 is the industry standard as HL7 version
2 is today it needs several more years.
Where version 3 data types (V3DT) are still useful for your projects
is that V3DT are designed as useful elemental semantic entities in
health care. Thus, I would place my new application entirely on these
data types, no matter whether I want to do HL7 communication or not.
A V3DTREF implementation would be of tremendous use to application
design. Note that this is different from a mere "parsing"
library. V3DT is more than just data structures that you parse out and
then split into pieces. Those data types are actually useful for doing
real work.
Just to give you an example: Physical Quantity would be a lot more
than just a container with a value and a unit. A Java or C++ class for
PhysicalQuantity would allow you to calculate with dimensioned
quantities and would allow you to convert between units
seamlessly. Actually I did this part of the implementation already, so
I know that it works nicely.
Another example would be the various forms of time and their
operations. The difference between two point in time values would be a
physical quantity in the dimension of time. An interval of time can be
used to specify start, end and duration of a health care event. A
consistent handling of incomplete information would allow you to know
the width of the time interval (i.e. the duration of the event) even
though you don't know the start and end. The new periodic point in
time and periodic interval of time types will facilitate to develop
scheduling and order entry systems.
What's more you can express uncertainty of all information in a
consistent and correct way using point probabilities and probability
distributions (both parametric and non-parametric distributions.)
You can use the Technical Instance Locator to launch a Web Browser,
send an alert via e-mail or pager, or call up a phone or fax machine.
We have a nice way to handle person names and addresses suitable for
an international/intercultural use.
and on and on.
There is a lot one can benefit from a V3DTREF implementation that
would give you
(1) all the semantic operations
(2) the mapping to nice XML representations (building and parsing)
But we are not quite there yet, we have not even begun to bring those
dreams to life :-) that's where I appreciate your support.
If you want to learn more about V3DT here is the link to the most
recent drafts and other material:
http://aurora.rg.iupui.edu/v3dt/
the most recent revision is 0.95. Your comments are highly
appreciated.
Thank you,
-Gunther
Gunther Schadow ----------------------------------- http://aurora.rg.iupui.edu
Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
1001 W 10th Street RG5, Indianapolis IN 46202, Phone: (317) 630 7960
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