CSC466 Project

Overview

This is the website where I will be posting the progress of my project. 

Problem

As we all know health care systems are crucial to the wellbeing of the public. Any mistakes or flaws in a health care system can result in the death or the harm of patients. That is why it is important to have secure and standardized protocols to exchange the information between health care systems. Over the decades as we moved away from paper medical records and transitioned to electronic health records (EHR’s) the need for these protocols to be secure and standardized greatly increased. In today’s medical systems landscape the necessity for secure EHR transfers is more important than ever.

With the need for reliable EHR transfers came the establishment of the HL7 (health level 7) protocol. The HL7 protocol is one that is more focused on how the data is formatted when being transferred as opposed to how the data is transfer occurs. The HL7 protocol operates on the application layer of the OSI model [1] and depending on the version of HL7 it either pairs TCP/IP with HTTP/HTTPS or simply just TCP/IP to send HL7 messages. The first version of the HL7 protocol was released in 1987[1] and since then there have been many versions that have been released. The most common version in the last decade has been HL7 v2.x[1] but with the emergence of HL7 FHIR many hospitals and health care providers have transitioned to using HL7 FHIR.  This project will be focused on comparing the performance and benefits between HL7 v2.x and HL7 FHIR. The industry has moved towards HL7 FHIR  as the standard but the question I am to answer is what was given up in the transition and what has been gained in the process.