Re:Hospitals lift curtain on prices, revealing giant swings ...
by lostlogin on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @04:16PM
(#28621185)
> God, I used to work in medical billing, and people would think these file format issues were some kind of scheme.
I think it must be at this point. The hot garbage that is medical data formats (HL7, in particular) and the ways you can break it as a user, unknowingly and silently. It’s incredible that a format this bad has hung around this long.
It’s not ok that users can type certain characters into a field and break the system.
A surprising amount of stuff (at least medical billing side) can be flat file moves, especially if you are billing into lots of different systems.
And yes, the idiot new person with a phD says, just quote every field with a ". Great - you program all this up, along with the required escape sequence handling, and then escapes for escapes. \ and / get used a fair bit sometimes already and we are dealing with tons of systems.