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Re:Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your fie... by epmatsw on Sunday February 05, 2017 @01:11PM (#13573608)
When I looked at HL7 a few years back, it was standardized on in the most technical sense and was basically a big bag of hurt. Epic made a big chunk of their money just charging people to build interfaces over various PACS (and other) systems. Has that changed recently?
Re:Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your fie... by kayman on Sunday February 05, 2017 @05:28PM (#13575069)
HL7 has matured even more now. The linear evolution from HL7 v2 to HL7 v3 did not win the day. Most are now moving to https://www.hl7.org/fhir/

Main issue is with HL7 is not technical. From a business point of view, the incentive to cooperate with other systems via HL7 means another reason for a department to adopt a system other than yours.

Re:Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your fie... by sufyanadam on Sunday February 05, 2017 @10:48PM (#13576352)
Ruby makes working with things like HL7 super easy. Check out the super extensible HL7 ruby parser I wrote here: https://github.com/sufyanadam/simple_hl7_parser. It currently focuses on parsing ORU messages but can be easily extended to support any HL7 segment. Feel free to submit a PR :)
Re:Ask HN: What is the most exciting development in your fie... by aabajian on Sunday February 05, 2017 @02:49PM (#13574167)
Yes and no. I spoke with an Epic engineer recently and he confirmed that Epic is still a front-end to HL7 databases. With that said, many PACS are adopting the WADO standard (https://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/projects/software/wado/), which provides a REST interface to radiology images. It makes it a lot easier to retrieve images for analysis, albeit you'd still have to implement DICOM/HL7 if you want to make a usable product.