Facilitating the design of HL7 domain models through a model-driven solution

Background and goal: Health information systems are increasingly sophisticated and developing them is a challenge for software developers. Software engineers usually make use of UML as a standard model language that allows defining health information system entities and their relations. However, working with health system requires learning HL7 standards, that defines and manages standards related to health information systems. HL7 standards are varied, however this work focusses on v2 and v3 since these are the most used one on the area that this work is being conducted. This works aims to allow modeling HL7 standard by using UML.

Methods: Several techniques based on the MDE (Model-Driven Engineering) paradigm have been used to cope with it.

Results: A useful reference framework, reducing final users learning curve and allowing modeling maintainable and easy-going health information systems.

Conclusions: By using this approach, a software engineer without any previous knowledge about HL7 would be able to solve the problem of modeling HL7-based health information systems. Reducing the learning curve when working in projects that need HL7 standards.