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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

The medical profession has an electronic document standard in HL7 Clinical Document Architecture, Release 2. http://www.hl7.org/v3ballot2009may/html/infrastructure/cda/c... It's an XML format so there is no character limit on narrative sections. Apparently that one vendor just decided to impose an arbitrary limit for no good reason.

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Could it be for backward compatibility with something else?

A lot of medical data processing is spread through a huge series of SQL and mainframe databases with lots of hacks to keep them roughly compatible.

A friend worked medical database where "sex" was a seven field containing values from {"F", "M", "Male", "woman"...} etc.

This is horrific but it's possible to imagine that it arose as a compromised between various equally terrible options...

I'd assume that the actual data is kept in a column in a table (one that's only 1000 characters long) and only output in the XML format.

Reminds me of a health insurance form I filled out where it asked you for your gender, but never your sex.

For the curious: http://www.who.int/gender/whatisgender/en/index.html

Essentially, sex is biological while gender is social. Transsexuality is a disparity between what someone was born biologically as (sex) and what they identify as (gender).

HL7 is primarily used as an interchange format, not storage. Does any currently used system actually use the CDA or EHR model?

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