Archive for the ‘HL7 Standard’ Category

Learn more about the next HL7 Working Group Meeting, happening on September 20-25.

“Simplicity is drawn from the complexity of problems. Once you ultimately deal with the complexity, the simple solution is no longer simple.” – Wes Rishel This week I’m attending the SOA in Healthcare Conference co-sponsored by HL7 and OMG. As you might guess by the title, the meeting is focused on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) use within healthcare [...]

Timezones are qualified with an hour and minute offset from GMT and not with a flag indicating daylight savings time. There is no method or technique in HL7 to indicate if the time given in the message is daylight savings time or not. I previously wrote about the challenges of time zone qualification within an [...]

Kai Heitmann, who is the HL7 International Representative to the Board of Directors, reported this morning on the attendance mix at the September 2008 HL7 Working Group Meeting (WGM). Given that this meeting is the “international meeting” for the year and also Annual Plenary session, it is no surprise that the mix of US and [...]

Moving dates and times between systems via HL7 has two primary challenges: Clock skew/drift — the systems don’t agree on the definition of “now” Time zones — the systems differ in their offset from UTC/GMT While both problems are easy to understand, the two challenges are solved in very different ways. Here is a summary [...]

In most V2 messages are encoded using the local time on the system that generates the message; many interfaces do not support the concept nor use of time zone.

At last week’s HL7 Working Group meeting, it became clear that US adoption of the HL7 Version 3 Standard is still years away, with one lone exception:  Clinical Document Architecture (CDA). It seems as though implementation of the larger standard is still seen as a herculean task, requiring not just a rework of HL7 2.X [...]

Since it’s inception in 1998, IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) has embarked on a commendable mission to “improve the way computer systems in healthcare share information.” Over the past 10 years the initiative has made great strides in standardizing the implementation of not-so-confining “standards” such as HL7. In so doing IHE has developed a plethora [...]

HL7 Standards Update. HL7 2.X continues to march forward with new releases. HL7 2.6 is done (just published this week) and proposals for 2.7 have closed — the first ballot for HL7 2.7 will be in May 2008. From a practical perspective, this means that 2.7 will hit the streets sometime in late 2009. Most [...]

Every healthcare environment bills for services provided. The goal of billing is to increase reimbursement in a timely fashion. How does the HL7 Standard help in this endeavor? Automating clinical data delivery through HL7 interfaces provides accurate information quickly to the billing department. When transferring patient’s billing information through HL7 messaging, it is helpful to [...]