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I was referring to all frameworks/standards that the HL7 org has developed for handling of patient/clinical data. Patient data is not special other than its se

by fjabre 8y ago

I was referring to all frameworks/standards that the HL7 org has developed for handling of patient/clinical data. Patient data is not special other than its security requirements. There does not need to be a layer of standards in this space dedicated to handling/transfer of clinical/hospital data between organizations. Private industry & hospitals can solve this without the need for a standards board or HL7 standards. We have enough standards for handling/transfer of sensitive data. Engineers have already solved that with interoperable data systems dedicated to managing and sorting through large sets of data. Healthcare data is simply data. There are plenty of other types of highly sensitive data that don't need an entire organization dictating bloated standards implementations that are already highly fragmented themselves. HL7 is an unnecessary abstraction.

nradov 8y ago
It's always disappointing to see comments like this on HN. We sometimes get engineers on here who wrongly believe that just because they're good at coding (or whatever) they must be experts on anything, even when they have minimal knowledge of the actual problem domain. You obviously haven't read through all the HL7 standards. The core HL7 standards only touch on security tangentially. The primary focus is on message and document formats for clinical and administrative interoperability. The whole reason that HL7 exists as a standards development organization is precisely because private industry and hospitals (plus other stakeholders) formed it to have a governance body for working on this stuff. It's literally impossible to figure out data formats on an ad-hoc basis with more than a few participants. Never mind the legal antitrust and IP issues. Engineers have certainly not already solved data systems interoperability in the general case. Every major industry has its own standards bodies. In health IT especially the engineers usually lack the domain knowledge to make good decisions on their own; the administrators and clinicians have to be involved on an equal footing. Instead of just complaining, if you have actual good ideas to suggest then create a formal change request for the applicable standard. The process is completely open and contributions are welcome.

by fjabre 8y ago

nradov 8y ago

It's always disappointing to see comments like this on HN. We sometimes get engineers on here who wrongly believe that just because they're good at coding (or whatever) they must be experts on anything, even when they have minimal knowledge of the actual problem domain. You obviously haven't read through all the HL7 standards. The core HL7 standards only touch on security tangentially. The primary focus is on message and document formats for clinical and administrative interoperability. The whole reason that HL7 exists as a standards development organization is precisely because private industry and hospitals (plus other stakeholders) formed it to have a governance body for working on this stuff. It's literally impossible to figure out data formats on an ad-hoc basis with more than a few participants. Never mind the legal antitrust and IP issues. Engineers have certainly not already solved data systems interoperability in the general case. Every major industry has its own standards bodies. In health IT especially the engineers usually lack the domain knowledge to make good decisions on their own; the administrators and clinicians have to be involved on an equal footing. Instead of just complaining, if you have actual good ideas to suggest then create a formal change request for the applicable standard. The process is completely open and contributions are welcome.