I was actually hired at Oracle Health Sciences to work on the HTB application. Long story short, when HL7 version 3 was relatively new ... Canada made an initial sprint at adoption. Since then progress has slowed. I was part of that initial adoption and learned a lot about the Reference Information Model. At that time we worked mostly with CDA R2 Level 3 (fully coded/ structured xml) documents.

HTB is a HL7 v3 RIM-based repository. Love it or hate it, the product is unique in the market place. One of the advantages is the flexibility of the model. You can aggregate information from literally any source system without any HTB data model modification and then use that data in a semantically meaningful way. That's extremely powerful.

There is a minor speed bump getting up to speed with HL7 v3, there's no doubt about that. I believe that is why Oracle recruited me from Canada originally - so I could have a running start at HTB. In the near future I'm looking forward to an application deep dive with John Hatem.