40 Years of Healthcare Integration

iW is the new face of Eliot Muir the creative force who founded iNTERFACEWARE that invented Chameleon and Iguan. Healthcare has spent roughly 40 years building HL7 interfaces. Thousands of hospitals, laboratories and vendors depend on them every day for admissions, orders, results and other essential workflows.

They aren't fashionable. But they work.

Over decades, these interfaces have accumulated customer requirements, exceptions and workarounds that were often never documented. The original developers may be long gone.

In many cases, the working interface has become the specification.

The problem is economic. Customers paid to create these interfaces because they needed them. There is rarely a similar budget to rebuild them simply to reproduce behavior they already have.

Yet the technology underneath them is aging, while security requirements continue to increase.

Healthcare is caught in the middle: these interfaces are too important to discard, but too expensive to rewrite conventionally.

The valuable asset isn't the old technology. It's the behavior encoded within it.

The challenge is to preserve that behavior while replacing the aging machinery underneath it — at a cost the industry can afford.

Doesn't FHIR solve this?

Unfortunately, FHIR makes the issue of keeping long term infra-structure harder.

Next: Why FHIR doesn't solve the legacy problem.