Architectural and Strategic Foundation Program for Software Development Teams

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With the healthcare market demanding more effective interfacing capabilities, you may be faced with either:

  1. Building a team to develop, implement, and support HL7 interfaces
    • Should you build your own platform?
    • Should you buy a solution or use outside help?
    • What is the best architecture and approach?
  2. Continuing with your current HL7-enablement approach
    • Has this approach proven to be cost-effective?
    • Is it supportable in the short and long term?
    • Is it distracting from core development priorities?

For any development team, implementing a new interface solution can be challenging. For some teams, implementing HL7 is straightforward. For others, the scope of an interface project can quickly expand, and the “simple job” of implementing a flexible standard interface turns into a taxing project.

HL7 interfaces goes beyond the parsing of a few vertical bars and carets and writing a wrapper around Winsock and TCP/IP. Many product teams discover that adding HL7 is much less about coding and more about building an entire application mindset around integration. Such a shift has architectural impacts that should be reviewed early in the project.

Adding HL7 to an application is similar in scope to shifting databases or development languages. While on the surface, such a change in technology would be “easy”, ultimately the developers discover many things that need to be architected, addressed, adjusted, or avoided.

Without architectural input, a large project may prove to be like steaming toward an iceberg – the top ten percent of the iceberg is clearly visible above the surface, but it's the ninety percent under the water that often capsizes the project. Interface development is like any other development project in terms of the cost to fix bugs and add features: It is vastly cheaper to fix issues before coding begins than to fix them once the product has been delivered to the end user. Problems that cost very little to avoid during the strategy and implementation phase will cost many thousands of dollars to solve after project implementation.

NeoTool offers a program to assist during the critical early stage of interface implementation. Our Architectural and Strategic Foundation Program (ASFP) is a short-term consultation that makes years of field knowledge available to your implementation team.

ASFP for Software Development Teams:
Outlined below are several issues that must have well architected answers:

  • Reviewing workflow in target applications and reconciling to the data and message models.
  • Dealing with the typical technical hurdles that appear during implementations.
  • Understanding the impact of adding HL7 to your product(s) selling, implementation, acceptance, and (as appropriate) license revenue recognition and payment cycles.
  • Preparing for users who will build an interface to your application on their own.
  • Defining flexible business logic to minimize interface rework when deploying in new environments.
  • Understanding what is absolutely required in every HL7 interface and why.
  • Selecting a support policy for interface issues covered by standard support vs. extra time and materials fees.
  • Writing a solid HL7 specification based on industry best practices.
  • Determining and then justifying a price point for the interface (if licensed).
  • Rationalizing the total cost of developing, testing, deploying, and supporting interfaces during each install.

During the brief ASFP engagement, we will learn as much as possible about your application and its need for HL7 interfacing. We will then help create a roadmap that provides a suggested direction on the required infrastructure, methods of deploying interfaces, and specific next steps your team should consider taking.

The ASFP is a fixed price training and consulting engagement to help you set the strategic direction and develop an architectural foundation for your HL7 implementation. Key questions to be discussed and addressed will include, but are not limited to:

  • What workflow issues must be solved?
  • How well does the HL7 data and message model match the required workflow?
  • What business issues must be addressed with the interface?
  • Will the flexibility of HL7’s message structure and data model be a help or an impediment?
  • How well do the sending systems’ data models match the target applications’ data models?
  • How do we complete a gap analysis between the data models?
  • Can the sending system provide all required data?
  • What code sets will be used and how will they be synchronized?
  • What master file issues will occur and how will they be maintained?
  • What HL7 triggers are required to complete the interface?
  • What MSMQ interface should be used?
  • Will filtering or routing of the data be required?
  • Will mapping the data to specific fields be required?
  • How can information in a database be accessed?
  • How can data be inserted into a database on a receiving system?
  • Will translation of XML schemas be required?
  • How will the sending application trigger the sending of data?
  • How will conflicts between the database and HL7 or XML be resolved?

The ASFP’s benefit is solving your immediate interfacing challenges without sacrificing a view towards the long-term costs. The end result will be a significant savings on your current and future projects.

For more information on our ASFP program, please contact your NeoTool Account Executive at 866-636-8665 or send an email to sales@neotool.com.