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Comment by time0ut | Hacker News Reader

I spent a decade working with ANSI X12. Writing software to generate it, streaming parsers for mutli-gigabyte batches, tools to display it, consume it, validate it, etc. Really interesting world to deal with. Every trading partner had their own interpretation of certain things. In my experience (healthcare) things slowly improved over time. Supposedly, FHIR will will take over in that space, but I have my doubts.

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FHIR will take over, but I wouldn't call that a good thing. the development of FHIR is extremely haphazard, most of it will turn into a generic KV store and miss a lot of the great systems thinking in EDI. It's as if they lowered the barrier to entry at the expense of robust document exchange.

Hopefully Stedi can make adopting EDI easier and increase its popularily over the next 50 years and there isn't such a demand to create alternative systems.

FHIR can now be used instead of X12 for prior authorizations but in the US it can't be used for claims yet. Claims will continue to rely on X12 for many years.

Healthcare wasn't using HL7? Another rather old, heavy data exchange format.

It is used for exchange of clinical data like admission notifications and health records. X12 is used for administrative data like enrollment and claim submission. I have worked with both.

HL7 is a standards development organization, not a data exchange format. They publish several major standards including V2 Messaging, CDA, and FHIR.

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