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The EasyHL7 system was created for developers of medical software (primarily using Microsoft's Visual Basic or .Net platforms) who want to integrate HL7 processing into their applications. The problem with HL7 integration for the small to medium scale medical software development community has always been the lack of simple, reasonably priced tools that will allow them to concentrate their time (and their budget) on developing their own software, rather than worrying about the continuing problem of linking their system to others via HL7. Historically, the problem has been resolved in one of two ways. Either 1, you develop your own HL7 translation system or 2, you purchase (or have your customer purchase) an 'off the shelf' HL7 translation system. Both of these solutions have their own set of problems. See our 'Developers Overview' for a feature discussion of how we designed EasyHL7 to address these issues.
Problems with developing your own HL7 Translation system:
| • | The rules keep changing. Trying to keep track of the many different trading partners (we refer to them as 'Vendors' in EasyHL7), each using different flavors of HL7 with their own implementation guides. In the medical software market there are thousands of different applications that you may be called upon to interface with. While it would be wonderful if everyone used HL7 the same way; unfortunately it's not the case. |
| • | Deployment. To implement a new interface you often have to redeploy your entire product. |
| • | Resources. Let's face it, development resources are expensive. If your product is a Lab processing system or a Prescription system you want your programmers to spend their time concentrating on those things. That is your product, these features are what you have to use to beat the competition. Integration with other systems is one of those things that we all must do to stay competitive. |
Problems with purchasing a third party HL7 translation system:
| • | Your customer's needs define your business, NOT the HL7 standards board. You've done everything right, you've developed a great medical software product of your own and gone through great pain and expense and integrated a 3rd party HL7 processing system into it. Now it's time to sell it to customers. Your first 5 customers; everything works great THEN on new customer #6 your solution doesn't work because of some unforeseen 'quirk' in their HL7 implementation needs that your 3rd party solution doesn't handle. What do you do? Walk away from the sale, or try and create a 'patch' or workaround to get past the problem. |
| • | Price and redistribution. When you're trying to stay in business selling a piece of software that retails for $500.00 it's hard to explain to the customer that they have to pay an additional $2,000.00 to $70,000.00 for HL7 integration. Most 3rd party systems are not redistributable and require that the customer also purchase the product. So, you have to buy it to develop the solution AND your customers have to buy it to use the solution. |
| • | Setup and Training. HL7 systems are notoriously difficult to set up and configure. This setup and configuration is usually not portable and needs to be redone at every customer site. |
| • | Option overload. When shopping for 3rd party systems, you often find that to get the ONE feature that you absolutely need, you have to buy a system that does 100 other things that are outside of the scope of anything that you'll ever need. |
| • | Deployment and version control. What happens if a vendor you have created a solution for changes their version of HL7?. What happens when your 3rd party software puts out a patch or new version of their software? |
| • | Support. Will they support your customers? Will your customers accept that they have to call the 3rd party with support issues. If your customers are anything like ours, when they have a problem with any facet of your solution they call you. |
The easy HL7 API (Application Program Interface) is divided into 3 sections.
| 1. | Is devoted to discussing EasyHL7.exe. This is the program that you installed. In addition to being functional (you will use it to create redistribution licenses, new vendor definitions, run reports etc) it is also the Demo Application. All of the source code for this program is included (it's remarkably small) as an example of how powerful the components are. |
| 2. | Is devoted to creating applications with a user interface (EHL7Interface.dll) that uses the built-in user interface components that were used to develop the EasyHL7 Demo application. |
| 3. | Is devoted to creating service applications (The EHL7 Runtime DLL) that will handle your HL7 processing for you automatically. |
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