What do vendors mean when they say they are HL7 CoCompliant?
HL7 v2.X has a great deal of flexibility built into it to accommodate differences within different environments and locations. This flexibility has provided a great deal of value but it has also come with a cost. The cost is that a vendor can say they are HL7 compliant and it can mean many different things. It is not enough to simply ask a vendor if they are HL7 Compliant. It is essential to get into the details with the vendor about specifically how they have implemented the standard. Note: there are a few places in the 2.x standard where the developer/implementer can choose between multiple different approaches to take for a particular implementation issue, all of which are supported by the standard. An example is the ADT^A09 and ADT^A10 trigger event messages which each have three situations that could be recognized as valid for triggering them. An implementing system could support any one, any two or all three, and be able to back it up from the standard.
