[Health-dev] HL7 support in GNU Health

[Emilien Klein]

Hi Luis and the team,

2012/11/23 Luis Falcon <address@hidden>:
> On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 5:51 PM, Emilien Klein
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> I've also started a new page about contributing to the project:
>> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/GNU_Health/Contributing
>> Reason is that I'm thinking about adding HL7 support, starting with
>> basic ADT (I'll send more details later) but for now I'm a bit unclear
>> on how you guys set up your development environments. It would be nice
>> if you could add some details to that page, serving as a first step
>> for people that want to start coding.
>>
> Great ! We tend to integrate Health with free software middleware,
> like Mirth connect or others for HL7 messaging. But please feel free
> to let us know your thoughts.

Can you expand a little bit? Does this mean that by integrating GNU
Health with those middleware, you're able to send HL7 messages (for
example when a new patient is created, admitted, discharged, or when
appointments are made, orders are placed, etc?) directly when those
actions happen in GNU Health? If that's the case, then it maybe isn't
necessary to do what I'm thinking about...

I know Mirth as being an interface engine, not sure in which manner
you integrate with it, can you also talk a bit to that? I do think
that it would make sense for GNU Health to natively "speak" HL7, since
it's kind of the de-facto language for so many ancillary systems
(labs, radiology, modalities, pharmacy, etc.). With the upcoming
"liberation" of the HL7 specs [0], I'm fairly sure better integration
in this world would only be positive for GNU Health. But maybe you've
got Mirth directly plugged in on the PostgreSQL database, as it
appears to be possible (not familiar with that myself...)

At the day job, I'm an interface analyst for a major vendor (of which
I'd prefer to keep the name out of this discussion), and I'd like to
be able to share my knowledge working on a FLOSS project. GNU Health
seems interesting enough for this! Plus I just love Python ;)

In case it's currently not able to interface GNU Health with other
systems, I'd be glad to work with you on the design of this new HL7
module. The goal would be to do that in an integrated manner, as you
guys are the expert on the way GNU Health works, and interfacing
requires ways to "plug in" the application, so in depth knowledge of
the software is needed (which I obviously don't [yet] have ;) )

Let me know!
     +Emilien

[0] 
http://www.hl7.org/documentcenter/public/pressreleases/HL7_PRESS_20120904.pdf