Re: [Health-dev] HL7 support in GNU Health

[Luis Falcon]

Hi Emilien !

On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 6:10 PM, Emilien Klein
<address@hidden> wrote:
> 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...
That's pretty much the idea. What the interface looks for is a way of
creating a xml (or other) encoded document that could be passed to a
middleware to "translate" into an HL7 or other type of message.

The idea about not creating an specific module for HL7 is that there
is a lot of debate about which version to use (HL7 v2 or v3), and that
I rather have a well formated schema that could be read by many other
parsers, not only HL7.

So, the idea is to have a general XML encoding engine, that can be the
base for many parsers.

>
> 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 ;)
Great !
>
> 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 ;) )
>
I think that creating this general xml encoded documents will help a
lot improving the interoperability with other HIS. We'll be talking
about this at IWEEE [0]

[0] http://www.iweee.org

Best,

> Let me know!
>      +Emilien
>
> [0] 
> http://www.hl7.org/documentcenter/public/pressreleases/HL7_PRESS_20120904.pdf
>



--
Luis Falcon
GNU Health
http://health.gnu.org