Making up for the inadequacies of antiquated systems is something of a core part of my role. Thankfully we have a replacement centralised system in the pipeline so this kind of work might become less frequent in the future, I hope.

The current problem to hit my desk is a case of missing fields from HL7 messages. The previous receiving system didn’t seem to mind and had not been sent this segment for several years, yet everything worked fine. The new system, however, really has an issue with it.

In time-honoured fashion, it now falls to the old dog to learn new tricks – meaning the new system cannot be changed (or rather the supplier, who shall remain nameless, is so large it isn’t prepared for provide development time to fix the issue for just one customer), so the old system which has remained unaltered for around 15 years, must be changed instead.

This work requires some integration tasks, storage of data to reference and manipulation of HL7 messages on the fly. It should be fun if nothing else and a good opportunity to work with the TIE and it’s developer.

Kick-off meeting is in a few days time.  Hopefully my sketched ideas should do the job.