I wholeheartedly agree with Horst's assessment.Ten years ago I was part of the team at DEC that was bringing HealthView to market (DEC's HL7 based integration engine)...at one point in fact it was suggested that it be given it away to stimulate the systems integration business. DEC never did get the synergy right between the software, hardware and services businesses...but I digress.
HL7 solved and perpetuated the problem it was meant to address. While it enabled the ability to integrate various applications through a single "hub" which is far better than the brittle point to point approach. It also allowed vendors to create the impression they were standards compliant by being able to say the were HL7 compliant...but each vendor often implemented their own interpretation of the standard. So as Horst pointed out a new industry was born...the "integration engine" business. I stopped paying attention to this stuff about five years ago... but it struck me that, from what I know, that many of the same interfaces have been coded over and over again...what would have happened if there was a public pool of interfaces for each of these "hubs"....last I remember one had to buy them. Lastly, the HL7 / integration engine solution has also permitted software applications to remain "monolithic" and not break down into the more granular sized components that have been described in previous posts by Nadalal and others. In summary IMHO HL7 and other standards need to be developed and disseminated in free public forums or you get what we have had for the last ten years. The fact that integration is still an issue is clear indication of failure...money aside, I am sure if one quantified the "human" opportunity cost of the approach taken so far even politicians would understand what to do. Joseph On Sun, 2003-12-28 at 02:08, Horst Herb wrote: > A lot has been learned, yes. But Andrew's statement - if we only look at what > is actually available AND in use today - is correct: HL7 has been en > exteremly expensive failure so far. A failure for more than a decade, that > is. > > Current development looks promising and I wish them wholehearted success - but > in one aspect they haven't learned from their past errors, and I consider > this non-learning a gloomy sign: that is, they don't publish their work > freely. You have to become a member to access their "standards". It does not > matter that membership is cheap - even a cent a year would not be acceptable > fpr the very reason that a standard cannot be a practical and ubiquitously > accepted standard (such as POP3, HTTP, HTML) unless the specifications are > freely accessible to anybody. > > Unless they start understanding this crucial issue, I reckon they are doomed. > No matter how much more money governments throw after them. The world in > general is not very fond of such "closed gentlemen's clubs", and end user > tolerance for such behaviour is close to zero nowadays. > > Horst
