Whenever I travel for work, one of the most common questions I hear is “How does HL7 work?”
HL7 is not always one of the sexiest subjects, but as interoperability and connectivity continue to be huge drivers in the health care space, the questions of HL7 are going to continue to be asked.
So, after a little thought, I thought I’d create a fun – and hopefully useful – video describing what HL7 is and what it does.
In keeping with our goal to provide the best possible service, documentation and support to all of our customers, I thought I’d take some time to create a second video in my “The Movie” series. A sequel, if you will, to the original: HL7 Demo – The Movie.
This time around, I wanted to show the creation of an outbound HL7 interface but was hoping I could “jazz” up the process a little while showing the ease of our tools.
The video only runs about 7 minutes, but in that short amount of time, I’m able to take the data from my database, map it into HL7 messages and configure Iguana to send my HL7 feed out to a receiving application (in this case, the HL7 listener).
Updated: This post lead to a number of requests for HL7 and Iguana Training. We’ve recently updated our website to offer online registration for both and more information can be found here: Iguana and HL7 Training
Last week I had the pleasure of traveling to Boston, Massachusetts to attend the HL7 Educational Summit. The summit and the instructors were fantastic and it was great to spend time talking with the other participants. For those unfamiliar, the HL7 organization offers various forms of HL7 training and HL7 certification. During the educational summits, you can sign-up for 2 full days of classes followed by an optional certification exam. The classes are quite intense and it’s highly recommended that you read Chapters 2 and 2A of the standard before arriving. Unlike our training – which is geared towards real-world design and implementation - I think the educational summit classes are best suited for people who – like me – are interested in understanding the micro-details of the standard.
This year, I thought I’d brush up on my HL7 v2.6 knowledge, so I signed up for the classes and even elected to take the HL7 v2.6 Control Specialist certification exam. Nothing like the fear of an exam to make sure you pay attention during class!
Started : Monday, June 1st, 2009 @ 11:02:43 AM
Duration : 17 minutes 3 seconds
Hostname : WinBuild64
Build_ID : WinBuild64/2009-06-01_11-02.Iguana_64
Source DateTime: 2009-06-01 15:02:46 UTC
Complete Success!
… but, what does that actually mean?
It’s the result from one of our successful builds of the 64 bit version of Iguana on Windows. Dmitri – one of the very talented developers who works hard behind the scenes here at iNTERFACEWARE to make all your HL7 integration dreams come true – did a fantastic job of putting together this latest 64 bit build.
If you’re interested in being one of the first to try out Iguana 4.1 (beta) on 64 bit Windows, you can find the latest build on our ftp site.
http://dl.interfaceware.com/iguana/windows/snapshot/
Sometimes – regardless of how advanced our software, hardware and networks become – it’s the simplest of problems that give us the biggest headaches.
That was the case for a few of our customers recently. After taking the time to build, test and deploy their interfaces, they were faced with a situation they hadn’t prepared for: What to do when duplicate messages were sent to one of their channels?
This may not seem like a huge issue when a message is accidentally sent twice – but imagine what would happen if, like a broken record, that same message was sent 100, 1000 or even 1,000,000 times. That’s a lot of needless stress to place on your database when all you’d be doing is updating an identical record.
HIMSS was a blast – I’m just back into the swing of things again in Toronto. For the last two weeks I’ve been busy interviewing developers – I guess I ought to delegate that task. But the choice of people you hire seems to be one of the most important things one can do in a software company so I still like to be hands on in this area. If you know anyone, we’re looking for people with top notch C++ skills and/or web interface AJAX type skillsets (it’s odd to get these two skill sets together so we’ll consider either or).
Thanks to everyone that made the effort to visit us at HIMSS and I apologize for some of you who dropped by when I was busy during demos. We got a lot more traffic than we anticipated and think most of us didn’t get the time to walk the floor, etc. as much as we hoped. Next time we’ll staff the booth up more – it felt hard to step away.
I guess for me it was a clear validation we’d picked the right strategy with our focus on Iguana 4.0. Over the last year and half I spent an awful lot of time talking to customers, understanding where the practical issues occur and figuring out how we could solve them. Inside the company we spent hours agonizing over the UI and usability issues. To be honest, I was not certain if customers would value all the effort we put into the product in that area – but to judge from the reaction at HIMSS we got an overwhelming vote of confidence.
Did you know that Iguana ships with a very handy tool that can be used to test – even stress test – your interfaces?
Along with the Windows HL7 Simulator GUI tool that many of you are probably familiar with, Iguana also includes a command line application – located in the Chameleon install directory – that can be very useful when testing your environments. Both tools have recently gone through an extensive overhaul process and are now more powerful, descriptive and useful than ever.
The command line tool has been around in our Windows builds for a little while now, and recently we’ve added it to our Linux distributions as well.
For the past several months, I’ve been conducting the majority of our online product demonstrations. I’ve gotten to speak personally with so many of our customers. It’s been a lot of fun and a great learning experience. As a developer, it’s extremely eye opening when you start seeing exactly how our products are used once they get into the customer’s hands.
Despite all these great things, this morning I was thinking about the one negative. Specifically, the repetition the presenter – in this case, me – has to go through to perform these demos. Generally speaking, our demos walk customers – very thoroughly – through a typical interfacing scenario from start to finish. A lot of the process is the same each time we go through it. I’ve always wondered if things would be easier if we offered a series of video-based demos that could be watched – on-demand – followed by a meeting to discuss and answer questions.
At the heart of that question is this simple fact: While our typical demos range anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes, the core process of creating a functional interface can actually be completed in about 10 minutes!
So, you’ve seen the announcement, read about all the improvements and even visited our blog – what’s next?
It’s time to upgrade to Iguana 4.0!
Upgrading to Iguana 4.0 is easier than ever. For most, upgrading is simply a matter of downloading Iguana – and running our installer. The installer will not only upgrade both Iguana and Chameleon, but it will also automatically backup and convert your existing Iguana configuration files to our new consolidated format.
We’re very proud to officially announce the launch of Iguana 4.0. This is a major milestone for all of us at iNTERFACEWARE. With months of design, development, QA and stress-testing behind us, everyone is very excited to see just how quickly – and easily – our customers have been taking to the new release.
Want to jump right in? Go ahead and download your free copy of the most current version here: IGUANA 4.0: HL7 Integration Engine
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