On Sun, 2003-12-28 at 11:47, Thomas Beale wrote:that's not what I meant by "translator" - the main purpose of most HL7 interfaceware is to convert some other format to/from HL7 ( that's what HL7 messaging is about, of course ); what I was talking about was the translators needed to make different varieties of HL7 software talk to each other - i.e. software that supposedly is already talking HL7 messages. This is the basis of Wes Rishel's quote that "once you have seen one HL7 implementation you've seen ...one HL7 implementation". The need for the former kind of data translation - legacy data to/from a target format - never goes away; the only question is whether you go for the ad hoc point to point approach (N^2 cost; or worse, since it's unplanned - often the same A-B transformations are solved more than once in different places or comapnies) or point - common standard approach (N*1 cost).
well, actually, even though HL7v2 had a mania of translators all over the place, and at great cost, it did succeed quite well. Where it succeeded best (to my knowledge) was in environments where translators were eliminated; i.e in New Zealand, where everyone uses exactly the same HL7 software, and to a lesser extent in Australia, where HL7v2 messages are standardised for he whole country.
Um, every hospital installation of HL7 in Australia of which I am aware relies completely on the presence of an HL7 translation facility such as STC DataGate/eGate (see http://www.stc.com/products/ICAN_productsEgate.asp ) for its success. And on a small army of software engineers, steeped in arcane HL7 knowledge, who look after the care and feeding of the HL7 translation facility...
Also, when I used the word "success", I meant in terms of what a judge of the overall health system would conclude, not what a vendor company would define as success; as we all know, vendors thrive on non-interoperability and translation of data. But in terms of running a health computing infrastructure for a company, it's a vast waste of money.
- thomas
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