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    <title>HL7Connection</title>
    <link>http://www.hl7connection.com/forum/user/dennisj/</link>
    <description><![CDATA[The latest forum activity by dennisj]]></description>
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        <title>Reply to &#8220;Software Solutions&#8221;</title>
        <link>http://www.hl7connection.com/forum/solutions/topic-6/page-1/?recent=30#post=30</link>
        <description><![CDATA[Hi matthew,

I think it's both ways actually . Genuine COTS  does not exist, is my opinion.  I've been working on integration projects for quite a while now.   The fact is that reality is not as beautiful as it appears.   Therefore you will need to adapt to the situation more often than you like. If you look at biztalk than this is not easy to do.  Some years ago I tested some java implementation but they were slow. I was satisfied with one commercial product  like chameleon, but these are quite expensive. They have loads of functionality that you want to use. The functionality that you want to use summons you to do it in a way .

The way I like to use  HL7 software is that it hides away the difficulty of the MLP over TCP IP and the parsing of the pipes. I can write my own software that gives me the application logic I want.  ( to be honest i can write the other parts too..).  I've written a piece of middleware software that does simply this (see www.connectinghealth.nl).  I can combine this middleware into my application easily. All i need to do there is  interpret the XML format of HL7.

Good software systems are composed of building blocks that do a specific task. SOA is meant for that, this means you gotta have  flexible interfaces, that per form task like "give me the laboratory results for patient x since date y). HL7 v2.x is in principle equipped to deliver that, but it is hell of a job to accomplish it in  practice . Writing sound and complete parsers for HL7 is a specialized job, and i've seen too many systems written in Visual Basic /excel/ access  by semi-professional programmers (mostly healthcare workers: Any one can program basic, duh), that had to be rewritten completely because optional segments jeopardized the plain  counting of '&#124;'.

Please feel free to have a look on my web site <a href="www.connectinghealth.nl" title="connecting health" rel="nofollow">here</a>". It has listed a handy and extremely efficient HL7 control. You have to do some work yourself (implement the application/business logic that you want, COTS cannot do that for you), but for the rest you can forget about TCP/IP MLLP and the pipes en such.

Kind regards 


Dennis]]></description>
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        <pubDate>Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:53:45 -0800</pubDate>
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