Why don I see HL7 RIM elements in the Tolven database schema definition?
Tolven is careful to avoid a common problem in healthcare: provider-specific customization in the database. This is often at the core of what prevents one provider from being able to talk to another provider or what makes such an effort expensive. While the HL7 RIM is a very good model, it is not the only reasonable model. Tolven does not want to impose the unintentional model limitations that are common with many software products: software vendor X supports version Y of standard Z. If we were to “memorialize” a specific version of a specific standard, our users might have to modify the schema to handle special needs and that would lead to compatibility issues, migration issues, etc. Tolven “abstracts this problem away” with the consequence that no specific standard shows up in the core data model. One way you might look at it is that Tolven standardizes at the XML schema level rather than at the database schema.
