Simple HL7 Library is released.

This project is not going to be a real popular site, because the subject is a little dry and esoteric. But if you have ever gone to a large hospital then chances are your patient information was sent using an HL7 network.

There are very few free HL7 resources on the internet. But there are a lot of custom coded applications and proprietary solutions available. This is an attempt to provide a solution that is both standard and free.

Health Level 7 (HL7) is a protocol that is used in the medical field to exchange information amoung multiple vendors. The homesite can be found at http://hl7.org

The first release is simply a development version that will spur me to make the product better out of sheer embarassment. The project is not usable at the current point unless you are desperate and want to do a lot of coding for me. ;)

My development plan spans the next 6 months and I intend to concurrently develop C, Perl, and Tcl versions because these are the three languages that are most often used in the field of interface programming. If you would like to contribute a version of the library in an additional language I would be glad to add it to the package in a contrib section.

Having the same functions in multiple languages will make writing single use data analysis tools and rapidly developing interfaces much easier and much more maintainable than when you had to roll your own solutions in each language.

Plus I will teach myself how to make a library in C, how to make a Perl module, and how to setup the automodule loader in Tcl.

Please drop me a line if you have any ideas, observations or comments about this project. Every idea that you can help me with is one less thing that I have to figure out for myself.