
@ShahidNShah
With healthcare IT integration tasks finally taking off because of Meaningful Use and other care collaboration requirements, HL7 interfaces will become even more important. After being involved in dozens of interfacing efforts over the past decade or so, I have found one of the most time-consuming aspects of integration is HL7 interface documentation: nobody has time to do it and it’s almost always treated as a “nice to have”. Given my experience I was thrilled to find that someone was finally putting together some solutions to make conformance specifications easier to document. I was even happier when it was a friend of mine, Jean-Luc Morin from Caristix, working on a solution. Like me, Jean-Luc has felt that pain of integrations acutely so I asked him to give us all some advice. Here’s what Jean-Luc wrote about what CIOs and IT Directors should be asking their vendors and partners about documentation when creating HL7 interfaces.
A quick HIMSS survey from 2008 stated that 60% of hospital CIOs are faced with juggling over 100 applications in their information systems. 85% are dealing with over 50 interfaces, while 60% are faced with more than 100. The HIMSS survey may be informal, but it confirms a major connectivity issue in our industry: there are a lot of interfaces out there. Interfacing and integration concerns aren’t going away anytime soon, especially with Meaningful Use as a driver.
Clearly, interfacing is a hot technical topic for CIOs and their integration teams. Yet this is just the beginning. There’s another strategic issue that — thus far — has stayed under the radar. That issue is interface documentation.
At first glance, documentation doesn’t seem like a CIO-level concern. In a typical implementation cycle, the team gets a few specs from a vendor. Someone signs off on an interface configuration document. Then you implement and go-live. The role of documentation in the larger scheme of things? Seems like a project management checkbox at best.
But it isn’t.
Your vendor’s interface documentation practices can have a major impact on the speed and success of implementation and on the maintainability of your new system after go-live.
With that in mind, we’ve prepared a list of questions for CIOs and IT directors to ask their vendors before signing on the dotted line.
These questions may seem highly detailed and technical for a single set of interfaces for a single new product. But multiply these details over the course of a hundred interfaces. With that many interfaces to manage, poor documentation can fuel a productivity and deliverability nightmare for CIOs, as team members scramble to play catch-up.
Clarify these issues upfront with your vendors, so you can mitigate risk down the road.
Shahid Shah is an internationally recognized enterprise software guru that specializes in digital health with an emphasis on e-health, EHR/EMR, big data, iOT, data interoperability, med device connectivity, and bioinformatics.
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