synthea VS simhospital

As someone working in this arena, I offer an alternative perspective for your consideration: healthcare was an early adopter of information technology and as a result many of its most core technologies come from a nearly unrecognizable time in computing. These systems are “outdated” as a result of success.

The current prevalence of these venerable technologies may be in part due to regulation, but more often has to do with their success.

HL7v2 is just token delimited ascii. Not unlike the similarly primitive but ubiquitous csv. The fields within it are defined by standards documents and once you use it a little, you can read enough to get the gist of most messages. As you might guess, modules in your language of choice are used to parse and compose HL7v2 so its detail isn’t that important.

Something I’d like to point out about Google Hospital is that under the hood it uses MITRE’s Synthea to generate synthetic patient data.

https://www.healthcareittoday.com/2017/09/13/open-source-too...

https://synthetichealth.github.io/synthea/

Have you tried Synthea? https://github.com/synthetichealth/synthea

Ultimately this is just an orchestration tool for publishing HL7v2 messages. You have to write your own pathways and segments, or push preconfigured HL7v2 messages. Take a look at the dashboard, you'll see what I mean[1].

Fairly sure they built this to test their HL7v2 store[2]. Also presuming it hasn't been very active given that Google surprisingly shut down their Healthcare division (and probably restarted it somewhere)[3].

[1] https://github.com/google/simhospital/blob/master/docs/dashb...