You don't think HL7 v3 being somewhat of a markup language was an improvement?

specialist · on Oct 30, 2015

It's a massive step backwards.

Bad has HL7 v2 is, it was a known evil.

With HL7 v3, there's so many more places to stuff data. And when it wasn't clear what goes where, partners created novel solutions. Just like with v2, but now with XML syntax.

We participated in an early NHIN competition (shoot out). The official WSDL only worked with one tool stack (Visual Studio?). I finally gave up and just screen scrapped the good bits. Used xpath to pull out the useful bits. Used SoupUI to create prototyped requests, manually massaged them to work, then turned them into Velocity templates.

We captured "official" requests and responses, stored them in source control. When something broke, we'd use diff to find the mutation. Turn-around was a few hours. Our two person team ran circles around our partner's teams with dozens.

I still use the fake it strategy for anything XML or web related.

ethbro · on Oct 31, 2015

As someone else who works in this space, this rings incredibly true.

I get the sense that the reality of any medical exchange format is 50% data structuring and 50% legal structuring.

Which is unfortunate... as lawyers aren't very good at commenting their code for non-legal professionals.