General discussion
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Topic
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HL7, is it practical?
LockedIt’s good to hear about the advances mentioned. For someone who has some knowledge of medicine and information. My review of the HL7 website continues to be underwhelming for what would seem to be such simple tasks.
I’m just referring to the format of the medical record like: registration, admitting, initial visits… This can easily be accomplished between a nurse, a doctor or two, some ancillary services people, a medical records librarian and a good programmer. Most of the element involved in the chart already exist preprinted sheets of paper (forms) with little spaces(fields) to enter the appropriate the appropriate information. All that has to be done is to formalize the names and a few validation characteristics and standard definitions such as whether the temperature is going to be presented in C or F. There will always be disagreements based on fixed preferences support usually non nonsensical abstractions. Soap, mini-soap, XML or a whole raft of other formats would serve the purpose.
It appears that the effort toward interoperability is being complicating and adding steps to provide openings for conversion programs which are entirely undesirable for design, efficiency and cost.
Visit the HL7 shop and see if you can figure out what they’re talking about with excessively priced specifications. There are some issues that as yet they are supposed to approach but haven’t that would be simple and very helpful, like finding medically oriented codes that are operable, extensible and public domain.
CPT codes are copyrighted by the AMA and there are probably three or four more codes that may require royalties. Once committed to these it will be much more difficult to change.