[ANN] Ruby-HL7 0.1.23

[Mark Guzman]

I've finally wrapped up some tasks and released Ruby-HL7. This is the
first public release.

What is it?
-------------

Ruby-HL7 is a library for parsing and generating HL7 2.x messages. HL7
3.0 message
support is planned for a future release. HL7 is a widely used medical
information
interchange format.

Feature list:
* flexible parsing support
* MLLP support
* provides a simple dsl for defining segments
* allows for arbitrary manipulation of segment data
* automatic segment ordering (via sort)
* familiar Array/Enumerable semantics

How do I get it?
--------------------

gem install ruby-hl7

or grab the tarbal from http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=3261

More info
------------

http://hasno.info/2007/3/18/ruby-hl7-0-1-23-released
http://trac.hasno.info/ruby-hl7
http://ruby-hl7.rubyforge.org

What else?
--------------

Please use the trac instance for bug reports and feature requests. I
will be monitoring the lists when
I can. March 25-April 3 I will be traveling to Japan and unreachable.

--mark

 

[Luciano Ramalho]

Since I had no idea what HL7 was, I looked it up and found this:

''Health Level Seven develops specifications, the most widely used
being a messaging standard that enables disparate healthcare
applications to exchange keys sets of clinical and administrative
data.''

http://www.hl7.org/about/hl7about.htm

Cheers,

Luciano

 

[bill walton]

I've finally wrapped up some tasks and released Ruby-HL7. This is the
first public release.

Nice work, Mark. I've been working on a Rails app that constructs
CCRs. Now that the harmonization work is complete, I am planning to
support CCDs in an upcoming release. That means I'm interested in
your v3 plans. Be glad to help if you're interested.

For those that aren't familiar with the healthcare space, there is
some very interesting work going on there - work for which Ruby is
very well suited, IMO. A lot of the Bioinformatics folks, for
example, have been using Perl for its pattern-matching capabilities
for quite some time. I'm of the opinion that Ruby, especially paired
with Rails, has a very good chance at becoming the language / platform
of choice in healthcare IT in the near future.

Best regards,
Bill

 

[Jonas Pfenniger]

For those that aren't familiar with the healthcare space, there is
some very interesting work going on there - work for which Ruby is
very well suited, IMO. A lot of the Bioinformatics folks, for
example, have been using Perl for its pattern-matching capabilities
for quite some time. I'm of the opinion that Ruby, especially paired
with Rails, has a very good chance at becoming the language / platform
of choice in healthcare IT in the near future.

Interesting. Is perl or ruby also used inside medical equipments or is
it only used in organisational softwares ?

 

[bill walton]

Interesting. Is perl or ruby also used inside medical equipments or is
it only used in organisational softwares ?

I suspect, but don't have any direct knowledge, that the software in
equipment is compiled code for all the usual reasons. Perl is popular
in Bioinformatics for its pattern matching.

Best regards,
Bill

 

[Luciano Ramalho]

Interesting. Is perl or ruby also used inside medical equipments or is
it only used in organisational softwares ?

An X-ray machine controlled by a Perl program... that's a scary thought.

Cheers,

Luciano

PS. Of course, there is nothing in C to make it inherently "safer" for
writing programs, quite the opposite.

 

[Akimichi Tatsukawa]

I've finally wrapped up some tasks and released Ruby-HL7. This is the
first public release.

Hello, congratulation on your work.

In Japan, I am developing HL7 messaging engine plugin for rails,
and planning to release it.
But, I met an obstacle.
Since I am an individual member of the Japanese HL7 organization,
I asked the office if I could release it under GPL license.
But, they said that the protocol specification documents are
the intellectual property of HL7,
and they were reluctant to give me a clear answer.
So, I hesitate about the release.

How do you deal with that license matter in U.S. ?
Your advice will be much appreciated.


Best regards,
Aki

 

[Mark Guzman]

Hello, congratulation on your work.

In Japan, I am developing HL7 messaging engine plugin for rails,
and planning to release it.
But, I met an obstacle.
Since I am an individual member of the Japanese HL7 organization,
I asked the office if I could release it under GPL license.
But, they said that the protocol specification documents are
the intellectual property of HL7,
and they were reluctant to give me a clear answer.
So, I hesitate about the release.

How do you deal with that license matter in U.S. ?
Your advice will be much appreciated.


Best regards,
Aki

Aki,
I developed this independently, based on prior knowledge. In your
case, I'd suggest citing the existing GPL hl7 libraries. There are
libraries available for java, perl and python. My understanding of us IP
law (IANAL) leads me to believe that once someone puts the IP into the
public domain it is possible to publish code that does the same thing as
it can be claimed that the knowledge came from those sources. I believe
GPL'd code would be considered public domain in this case. Good luck
Aki. I'm interested in promoting the usage of ruby in the medical world,
so drop me a line if you need or want any help.
--mark

 

[Akimichi Tatsukawa]

Hello, Mark
Thank you for a kind reply.

Aki,
I developed this independently, based on prior knowledge. In your
case, I'd suggest citing the existing GPL hl7 libraries. There are
libraries available for java, perl and python. My understanding of us IP
law (IANAL) leads me to believe that once someone puts the IP into the
public domain it is possible to publish code that does the same thing as
it can be claimed that the knowledge came from those sources. I believe
GPL'd code would be considered public domain in this case. Good luck

Thank you for your advice.
Although, I still have a lot of work to do prior to bring it out,
I'm convinced of that there isn't much problem releasing it.

Aki. I'm interested in promoting the usage of ruby in the medical world,
so drop me a line if you need or want any help.

I have the same wish as yours, to make use of ruby among medical information systems.
I hope your project will prevail in this frontier.

--mark

Aki,