ELECTRONIC DATA INTERCHANGE FOR HEALTH-CARE

This article reviews current standardization activities in North Ameri ca and Europe that aim to allow electronic data interchange among heal th care applications. It analyzes the requirements communication subsy stems must meet to allow for such standard-based communication between heterogeneous health care applications. To illustrate such a system t he authors present the architecture of the HL7/EDIFACT Communication S ubsystem (HECS) in this article. HECS provides communication agents th at interface with existing applications, as well as translation and ro uting functions based on a reliable underlying delivery mechanism.