Hospital sites will vary greatly in their level of preparedness and organization. One of the key things in preparing a site is getting the contract in place with the hospital that will cover key points in the relationship. Namely:

• How remote access will be given. Hospitals will sometimes be reluctant to give remote access. One way to negotiate this will be to give the option for it and charge extra if the hospital does not provide remote access.

• How the hospital will pay to have the site maintained. Maintenance is a vital part of HL7 interfacing since things will change over time at each site. The contract should make it clear that if the hospital changes the software systems in their environment in a manner that requires your organization to implement interface changes then this cost will be billed.

• How faults at each site will be raised to the attention of your Field Integration Engineers.

• The customer should be required to sign off on the HL7 specifications before the implementation begins. This is important to prevent unpaid change requests from being made.

Additionally it is very desirable if some of the information needed for the site database can be collected during this phase. Most critically, you will want to collect a set of sample data from each of the systems you will be communicating with. In practice this may prove to be quite challenging to orchestrate; however, clear and consistent requests can make all the difference.

Once the PO has been received with the contract in place, the process for bringing a new HL7 site on line can be broken into the following steps:

• The Accounting/Contract Personnel should add the new site to the list of sites that require runtime licensing for the month.

• The Field Integration Engineer should do the integration implementation work by customizing a base template VMD file. They can use a temporary or permanent product license to carry out the implementation.

• If a temporary license is used during the implementation, the Field Integration Engineer should notify the Accounting/Contract Personnel upon completion of the integration. When payment is received from the customer, the Field Integration Engineer should install a non-expiring license key.

• The Quality Assurance Engineer should receive the data and VMD files from the Field Integration Engineer for the new site and carry out the standard QA Processes for a New Site.