As an aside I spoke with the lab manager at my small hospital - a HL7 interface to take results from a machine, eg CBC, Chemistry, PT/INR, etc. and upload the data to their Meditech costs around 20,000 per machine - one for each of the above machines. So some of the results are hand entered into their software (hence human error prone)....unfortunately the HL7 and interfaces are a bit of a scam as software can still make it difficult to interface. AC is actually easy - Jon and I discussed this that if a company is easy to work with and wants to work with them to make an interface he charges little or nothing to do.....and if they are hard to deal with.....you get the picture.
