Unofficial Developer's Guide to HL7v3 Basics

Both the HL7 standard and software development methodology exist at a sufficiently high level of abstraction to support multiple interoperability requirements, even when these requirements conflict with each other. Some newbies portray HL7v3 as a "silver-bullet" solution. Unfortunately, neither HL7v3 nor separate components of the standard such as HL7 Reference Information Model (aka RIM) are "solutions". They are just new layers that separate end-user applications from the communication media, not a fundamental change in how data is communicated in existing computing infrastructure.

The focus of this book is to introduce readers to HL7 version 3 to the point that they confident enough to start building their own healthcare data exchange interfaces.