- Anonymous said...
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Have you found any positive points about HL7 V3. You seem to be sitting on the "anti HL7" side of the fence? Which current standards do you think would be a better choice for messaging and EHRs?
- Barry Smith said...
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I think we can probably leave it to the HL7's own marketing arm to document positive features of HL7 V3.
I think also that, in the age of internet services, it is becoming increasingly unclear whether the technology of messaging standards is needed at all. But even leaving this aside, HL7 V2 is a reasonably good messaging standard for its scope (mainly pathology results and imaging), and it is ten times simpler than HL7 V3 and already quite widely implemented. Where, then, is the business case for Version 3?
As to the Electronic Health Record, we must bear in mind that HL7 itself does not in fact have an EHR solution. And I am tempted to say that more or less anything that has been designed in response to EHR requirements would represent an improvement on something which does not exist.
HL7 (Health Level 7) is a collection of standards and proposals for healthcare-specific data exchange between computer applications. Considerable efforts are being invested by governments and industry to use HL7 as part of national health IT projects. Many claims are made on behalf of HL7 by its advocates. The goal of this blog is to investigate the merits of these claims, and to provide some needed independent perspective on the HL7 project.
I feel that the way things are going the "means"( to serve the "End" i.e better healthcare) are getting so complex that they are becoming an "End" in themself. It is a classic case of a tail wagging the dog! End result - healthcare becoming more and more expensive for the poor patient. I think it is time we stepped back to relook at how much needs to be the focus on IT in relation to core healthcare practices.
ReplyDeletergds,
Dr Lavanian MD