Answering Key Questions on Your HL7 System Purchasing Decision
Buying vs. Building an HL7 System
Whether you build or buy, the process is still essentially the same...
If you are considering adding an HL7 subsystem to your healthcare application – provider or vendor, the process you need to undertake is essentially the same. The questions below encompass what we believe are the key questions to answer prior to building or buying and then implementing your HL7 subsystem.
Answering these questions will help make your HL7 implementation easier to understand, and less time-consuming, and less costly in the long term.
What is HL7?
HL7 is a Standards Developing Organization accredited by ANSI (American National Standards Institute) to write standards representing a consensus of various entities in the healthcare arena.
HL7 is also the term given to a collection of standardization protocols published for the industry. HL7 specifications define an ideal presentation of information, or encoding rules. The broad objective is to provide comprehensive standards for the electronic exchange of data among healthcare applications.
To clear up a common misconception, HL7 is not a software application. The title HL7 conjures images of a packet of compact disks, manuals and clever icons. This could not be further from the truth. In reality, every HL7 version is a four-inch thick, three-ring notebook, with thousands of pages of detailed interfacing information.
The HL7 standard is a ‘book of rules’ that sets forth a framework for negotiation in interfacing, giving programmers and analysts a starting point from which to begin their technical discussions.
The prime objective of HL7 is to simplify the implementation of interfaces between healthcare software applications and various vendors, so as to reduce the need for custom interface programming.
What was originally created as an intra-hospital communications standard has matured and arguably become the undisputed, de facto model for the entire healthcare industry’s data exchange challenges.
Why is an HL7 subsystem so challenging to implement?
The strengths and limitations of HL7 are easily identifiable. Prior to the first HL7 standard being published, there was absolutely no framework for negotiation when it came to healthcare IT interfaces.
Vendors and providers sat down across the table from each other with blank sheets of paper and simply said, “Where do we start?” This not only created massive nonconformity in the healthcare interfacing, but also made healthcare interfaces painful to implement and costly to develop.
Over the years, versions of the HL7 standard have continued to develop slowly, methodically and thoroughly. The 2.X versions of the HL7 standard have become a comprehensive framework for negotiation for use in the developing of interfaces.
The standard is not, however, a rigid unbending set of rules. Version 2.X is simply an immensely detailed list of interfacing items set forth to discuss and to negotiate, leaving room for optionality and flexibility.
“Intentional optionality” was built into the original versions of the HL7 standard. The standard was built from the bottom up, beginning with very general concepts, allowing for additions to the standard when situations arose that dictated the need.
To ease adoption efforts, it was decided that early versions (such as version 2.1) would be frozen in time and that when making additions to the standard, all the new parts and pieces would become optional.
Backward compatibility was a goal in all 2.X versions of the standard, again, to make adoption of each new version of the standard easier to achieve. Therefore, the vast majority of what is now found in the most current balloted version of HL7 is optional or “open to negotiation.” Hence, implementing a standard that is inherently optional by nature can be a complex and time-consuming task.
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