Question: Starting with HL7
Nov 19, 2013Question:
I have developed a application on MVC 4 Platform with sql 2012 database. Now I want to make the application hl7 version 2.7 compliant. Can u please let me know steps that i need to follow to achieve HL7 compliance. It is my first project on HL7 and I don’t understand how i manage my database for HL7. Please if u can write steps that i need to follow to achieve compliance..
Answer:
Well, HL7 is an interface standard, for exchanging content. So you don’t just “achieve compliance” by doing something in your database - you use HL7 when you exchange content between your system and another system. The first place to start is when a customer or user of the system wants some data exchanged with another system - then you can start thinking about HL7 compliance:
- Characterise the data exchange (what data is exchanged? Who initiates the exchange? How are object identified? what codes are involved?)
- Agree how the data is represented in HL7 (what message types, what elements are used)
- Get test data
- Develop the interface
- Test using the test data with the other system
- (Optional) use a validation service to provide evidence of conformance (but this mightn’t be the same as proving it works)
An alternative, more produce focused approach is to provide support for a kind of exchange in your product, but this involves much deeper knowledge, and I don’t think you can or should try for this without first having done several one-off interfaces so that you know what variability your tooling has to support.
Aside: I know that a lot of people think that this variability is a weakness of HL7, and some parts of it are. But hyper-variability is a feature of the environment in which HL7 is used, and so variability is a feature of the standard.
Note that interfacing using HL7 will create implicit requirements for your database, but these are highly dependent on your architecture and requirements, so there’s no general documentation about what these requirements are.