es. They use these to create a model and then use a variety of custom and commercial programs to extract data from existing systems and transform it into a common format.
HBO and Company, for exam
ple, has written software to reconcile different ways of representing health-care data. You can write female, for example, as F, fem, or 1. IDX Systems has a program called ConnectR. It will send data between incompatible environments in any messaging format.
Playing in this arena will probably mean using health-care-specific messaging standards such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) Med, HL7, and Hewlett-Packard's Andover Working Group (AWG). HL7 is the most widespread, covering messaging formats for admitting and discharging patients, scheduling, billing, and other activities. It specifies a simple medical record and may evolve to cover more complexity and more managed-care data and areas of clinical care.
Rx for Data Warehousing
