Hi John (and others I CC-ed),

Thanks for the offer, I would like to take advantage of your knowledge of HL7.

Well here's the question:

Though I've search to a lot of documentation I did not figure out yet how to find the things I need. Do you know of any good and clear documentation of implementing the HL7 protocol ?

For example I need to get the demographic details of a given patient. Which command I should send (I think I know how to interpretate the resultstring) ?

Anotherone is to get the labresults of bloodtests of a given patient. I've not a clue which request to send and I did not figure out which resultstring I should expect.


The other question is about getting using the solution for more customers potentially using different HL7 protocols.

You've stated that using the Winsock solution would be a nightmare if trying to write a generic solution that can be applied to different customers. If I make the TCP/IP and port settings confirable in the software why is this going to be a nightmare ? The problem is that we don't want to spend thousands of dollars for only a few customer who are interested. At this point I also don't want to add an extra layer of potential problems either.

Further I'm interested in your solution to deal with different HL7 variants.

Thanks in advance,

Walter,







>Walter
>
>In 1997 we did a dial-in HL7 system for one of the big international drug companies. Patients on a certain medication visit labs for tests all over the country. The results are sent to our app which parses the different sorts of HL7, correlates all the various expressions of the same test value (different reference ranges, labels etc) and warns of patient safety issues. In 2002 we did another one to do exactly the same task, this one is a web system still in testing at http://www.clopine.co.nz .
>
>Glad to assist if you get stuck, I may not be able to tell you all the right things to do but I can certainly warn you what NOT to do!
>
>Regards
>
>JR