The pulse of the HL7 profession

Oct 16, 2012

David More drew my attention to “New poll takes pulse of HL7 profession”, and I couldn’t resist making some comments on it.

Most HL7 professionals have experience, but generally have limited tenure at their specific employers.

yep, that’s my experience. And very often this is a reflection of basic economics: organisational requirements for integration come and go, and the value of people who can fulfill these requirements varies accordingly. But people tend to respond badly to holding a fixed job with a variable income - hence the usual resolution to this is a contract/consultant model, or some other variation of a mobile workforce. And this is why many HL7 insiders are contractors or consultants like myself.

Also, they said:

About one-third of all organizations polled are currently lacking staff retention strategy

yep, this is certainly true. Considering my comments above, it’s a hard policy to have. But it’s also crucial, and my number one recommendation to vendors in particular: know your retention policy for integrators, because it will be tested.

The next one made me laugh:

Interface engines show room for improvement.Nearly half of all respondents – including 49.5 percent of CIO/CTOs, 46.6 percent of IT managers and 42.7 percent of HL7 professionals – report that while they’re using their interface engine for what it was initially intended, they know it has more capabilities they are not using

So, since an interface engine has capabilities people aren’t using, it needs “improvement”? That’s an, umm, surprising conclusion. Or maybe, it’s just that what people needs varies? And that the problems are hard, so the solutions are hard?

Finally, security:

While seen as important, security is not listed as a top organizational priority.Just two percent of survey respondents said information security was one of their top their priorities. But when asked how information security affects their top priorities, 89 percent of CIOs and 90 percent of IT managers said security is either integral to at least one their organization’s top priorities, or it is their top priority.

That’s primarily because integration is sufficiently difficult by itself without introducing security to the mix. In practice, you secure comms, and then treat the exchange as trusted. This simple policy mostly delivers the goods, and means that secrity need not be a particular concern for your HL7 integration experts (not compared to all the other things they need to be concerned about).