HL7 Products

The Products&Services taskforce (part of the initiative) has identified the folowing products:

• V3 Foundation
  • V3F Reference Information Model
  • V3F Vocabulary Domains & Value Sets
• V3 Messages
  • V3M Infrastructure
  • V3M Administrative
  • V3M Departmental
  • V3M Clinical
• V3 Documents
  • V3D Clinical (CDA)
  • V3D Administrative (SPL)
  • V3D Knowledge
• V3 Services
  • V3S Java Services (Java SIG)
  • V3S Web Services (OMG)
• V3 Rules
  • V3R GELLO
• V2 Messages
  • V2M Infrastructure
  • V2M Administrative
  • V2M Departmental
  • V2M Clinical
• Visual Integration Messages
  • CCOW
• Functional specifications
  • EHR

       

Product Positioning

(Rene Spronk): However, v3 messages is a product that to the average user of v2 messages is a "replacement product", which makes for a tough selling proposition. The market for v3 messaging is inter-organizational information exchange, the target audience for such a product is a different one than single provider organizations. It's regional networks and governments. Of all v3 messages, intra-organizational patient registries and provider registries have probably been implemented most - which requires a technical and organizational infrastructure to be in place before a single message is exchanged. It requires strategic and long term thinking on the part of our "customers".

CDA has a unique selling point in that is NOT a replacement of an existing standard (in effect it has no competition) and fits in both an intra-organizational as well as an inter-organizational setting. For an implementer standpoint it is relatively easy to implement.

v2 is our "best selling product", and it will still be there 20 years from now. It all depends on product positioning. v2 is well suited for peer-to-peer intra-organizational communications, i.e. those settings where a lot of "context" is implicitly shared between communication partners. (v3 messaging allows you to share the context explicitly, which ensures it can be used in inter-organizational settings)

All our products have a roll to play in systems integration. Pitching v3 messaging to an audience that currently uses v2 messaging is probably a waste of time. Pitching CDA will work regardless of audience. That's why CDA should be more in the limelight than v3 messaging.