My HL7 and DICOM Tutorials
My HL7 Tutorials
HL7 is a family of cooperating standards which collectively help provide a set
of organizational frameworks and guidelines to help in the design, implementation,
administration and operationalization of systems that perform healthcare-related
information exchange in an electronic format. The various standards contained
within the larger HL7 umbrella (such as V2, V3, FHIR, CDA, etc) help define how
patient care and any care provider-related information is communicated between
the various parties involved. Kmowledge of these standards is vital to enable
these disparate parties to exchange timely and critical healthcare data using
standardized data types and a structured vocabulary set needed to achieve seamless
integration between the various electronic health systems involved. My HL7 Tutorials should take someone with a background in any object-oriented language (C# or
Java is preferrable) and illustrate how the static as well as runtime behavior
of systems built using the HL7 standard will look like. I have recently added
a small interactive quiz on HL7 topics to engage the
learner. I plan to make this much more comprehensive in the future to benefit
learners pursuing certifications in the health informatics area.
My DICOM Tutorials
DICOM is a healthcare standard responsible for governing nearly all aspects of
medical imaging such as image transmission, image interpretation, print management,
procedure management and off-line storage, and is used in nearly all healthcare-related
imaging “modalities” such as magnetic resonance, nuclear medicine, computed tomography
and ultrasound. Nearly all clinical imaging workflows around the world are based
on the DICOM standard. Learning this standard is vital if you work or want to
work in the healthcare informatics industry.
My DICOM Tutorials are a series of short and focused articles aimed at someone who is starting with DICOM and wants to understand the theory by relating to some practical code examples. DICOM is an extremely large standard (some 6000 pages and growing each day) and is intimidating even to those who work with it on a daily basis. My tutorials are an attempt to provide a "digest version" of the many areas in the standard. These articles do not require any prior healthcare background or knowledge from the readers. Only a background in any object-oriented programming language such as C#, Java or C++ is required. I have recently added a small interactive quiz on DICOM topics to engage the learner.