iNTERFACEWARE™ Inc.
Previous iNTERFACEWARE Products Manual > HL7 Overview > Advantages and Disadvantages of HL7 > Why is HL7 Not Plug-and-Play? Next

Why is HL7 Not Plug-and-Play?

The following table explains why HL7 is not plug-and-play:

ReasonDescription
Missing FieldsSome vendors tend to omit fields in the message instead of leaving them empty. This will change the number of every subsequent field from the start of the message.
Same Data in Different FieldsThe same information may be located in other fields - and even in different segments - in various HL7 implementations.
Same Data in Different FormatsThe same data may come in different formats. For example, timestamp information should appear as 19991231100000.000, but some vendors divide the date and time into different sub-fields: 19991231^100000.000. This is only one example of the possible mis-formats.
Different Versions The existence of a number of different versions allows data exchange only between applications that support the same version of HL7.
Missing Values (including mandatory fields) Although the standard requires only a limited set of values to be present (95 percent of the fields are optional), some vendors omit even those with required values.
Invalid Segment GrammarThere is a lack of adherence to the segment grammar that is required by the standard. Some expected segments may be missing, while other unexpected segments may appear.

In this environment it is important to be equipped with tools that were created to deal with the diversity of HL7 implementations, standards and versions.

Previous iNTERFACEWARE Products Manual > HL7 Overview > Advantages and Disadvantages of HL7 > Why is HL7 Not Plug-and-Play? Next