What does an HL7 message look like?

When I created my first animated video – How does HL7 work? – I never imagined it would have the reach and impact it did.  In the few short weeks since it was released, the video has found its way onto dozens of corporate blogs, industry publications and personal sites.  It seems the interest in HL7 – especially when explained in plain English – is very high!

As the comments rolled in, a number of viewers requested a more technical HL7 overview video.   Not wanting to disappoint my “fans”, I thought I’d give it a shot.

It’s a good thing I’m always up for a challenge because as much as I love HL7 – and really, don’t we all – creating an HL7 tutorial to explain an HL7 message’s pipes, carets, tildes and ampersands isn’t exactly an easy task.

Have a look at my follow-up video – What does an HL7 message look like? – and let me know what you think.  Did I manage to capture the important elements of an HL7 message in a fun way?

How does HL7 work?

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.

HL7 Integration on 64 bit Windows

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/

Up for Air after HIMSS

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.