One of the most useful things about Chameleon is its ability to support multiple configurations of HL7 within one project. What this means is that as long as you keep the interface to your application consistent (tables, table grammars, messages that make up your definition file), everything else can change. This greatly reduces your maintenance costs for supporting different flavors of HL7.

For example, let's say you need to extract demographics from twelve different Health Information Systems. Each one has approximately the same data, but uses different segment grammars and fields within those messages to store the data.

Chameleon makes it possible to have a separate configuration for each one in the same message definition file, but map them to a common set of Chameleon messages and tables. In fact, by using Python scripting it becomes possible to have data which is formatted completely differently, massaged into the same normalized format.