May2006 WGM early adopter lunch

The early adopter lunch is hosted by the Implementation Committee

Just Two Minutes

There was useful discussion at the Lunch, with three projects being asked to speak for no more than two minutes each, saying what they liked about HL7v3, what they did not like, and what they wanted to see HL7 do for them.

Brett Esler

Good

Expert sources for clinical and administrative domains means generalist implementors can immediately gain the benefit of many years of experience and knowledge with completely specified models and interactions.

Bad

To be an implementor at this point is not easy. It is pretty much necessary to become a modeller to understand how to construct messages.

Challenges

Tooling! - need tools that make it possible to find the domains needed, and support constraining content for local implemetation. Implementors should be able to discover what is appropriate based on their specific requirements and be able to assemble basic message profiles. This would make HL7 v3 the best choice from a business perspective as it enables interoperability and reduces the costs of delivering it.

Bob Grant / Leon Savail

Good

Expert advice available through HL7 membership is excellent, and still necessary at this time for successful implementation of V3.

Engaging with the HL7 organization through participation in technical committees is practical way of keeping abreast of the changing V3 standard.

Bad

Tools: top of our wish list is tools for mapping from V3 specs to applications, esp. for legacy systems.

Challenges

If the scope of your implementation is broad you should anticipate being an early adopter of the Standard and breaking new ground. It's worth it, but you must factor into your plans a steep learning curve; ongoing participation in the organization to move your designs through membership approval; and retrofitting of early installations to the approved specifications.

Information

Projects supported by Canada Infoway, include the production of an open source messaging harness http://sourceforge.net/projects/crrs/

Discussion

During discussion a number of themes were raised:

• It was suggested that implementation workshops would be useful, where longer could be spent discussing implementation issues with the standard, and how they could be resolved. These sessions would focus on how to use the standard now, rather than on development of the standard which is what we focus on at the WGM
• There were questions about how to implement V3 with Snomed and who was doing it (a number were doing something with live interfaces now, but no-one claimed to be doing full post-co-ordination with Snomed and V3 yet)