If the guidelines for Ensuring Quality for a New Site have been followed and the HL7 database has been maintained correctly it makes upgrading sites to new versions of the HL7 interface much easier.

The Primary Integration Engineer should repeat the steps for validating interfaces taken for quality assurance in a new site. They should then take an up-to-date HL7 data sample for the current site and run it through the msgtransform to have another set of data to compare with the new HL7 interface and new VMD file. This should help identify problems early on before deploying the new site.

Ideally it should be possible to deploy the new software on a test server before altering the production server. There should also be rollback procedures to restore the earlier version of the software if necessary.