we have over 1000 clients with an array of different EMRs that all interpret the HL7 "standard" a little differently. working with client IT departments, EMR vendors, interface middle-men, etc, is a bitch. luckily we have a team for that so i don't have to do it.

 

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Can you write code that will rewrite Fist posts to make him coherent? Or is that beyond anyones mad skillz?

 

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Not true. Dogged, persistent, unwavering patience is mandatory in quality debugging. You cannot be an impatient debugger, or you will fail.

 

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I wrote this...





...and it still makes me laugh.

 

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I know, I'm just teasing.

 

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Yeah that would suck, especially with those awesome vendors who interpret the HL7 standard anyway they want and are big enough to back it up (Cerner, McKesson, Meditech etc). But I don't have to worry as much about that kind of thing because I work on the customer side. God help you if you're a small time vendor going between. It hospitals and big healthcare vendors.

 

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Have you ever written something, then years later had to go back and make a change and said, "How the hell did I do this?"

 

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Yes, very similar. I am changing it to do two separate checks that contain each scenario and then setting a Boolean to true or false based on that, then ending it by checking to see if each Boolean passed. So there is only one IF clause withh some ANDs in each one.

 

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I worked on this doozy a few weeks ago. The programmer that wrote it should be shot because there are better ways to do this. FYI, this is one of 20 if statements like this in the program. Due to the commonalities in the IF clusters the whole program should have been written with a select structure. Of course, they won't give us the time to re-write it, but it is a nightmare to maintain and we spend hours every month patching this POS program up.

So, is it cheaper to re-write the program in 40 hours or spend 10 hours a month for the last 2 years tweaking an abomination?

IF VAR1 OF PASSED-DATA NOT = 'VAL1' AND
...((VAR2 OF PASSED-DATA = 'A' AND
....VAR2 OF PASSED-DATA = 'L' OR
....(VAR2 OF PASSED-DATA = 'S' AND
....VAR3 OF PASSED-DATA =
......VAR4 OF PASSED-DATA) OR
....(VAR5 OF PASSED-DATA > 0 AND
.....VAR5 OF PASSED-DATA <= 165)) AND
...VAR4 OF PASSED-DATA NOT = 'VALUE2' AND
...((VAR6 OF PASSED-DATA NOT = 'D' AND
.....VAR6 OF PASSED-DATA NOT = 'C' OR
....(VAR7 OF PASSED-DATA NOT = 'VALUE3') AND
...NOT ((VAR8 OF PASSED-DATA = 'N' AND
.........VAR9 OF PASSED-DATA = '*' AND
.........VAR10 - VAR11 <= .7) OR
........(VAR8 OF PASSED-DATA = 'N' AND
.........VAR11 OF PASSED-DATA = 'A' AND
.........VAR12 OF PASSED-DATA > 0)) AND
...VAR13 NOT = 0 AND
...VAR14 NOT = 0 AND
...VAR15 >= VAR13 AND
...VAR15 >= VAR14 THEN
...MOVE 'VALUE4' TO VAR16 OF PASSED-DATA

 

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