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Enabling IT in Healthcare by simulating Patient Data

In the current times of pandemics and disease outbreaks, it is of paramount importance that we leverage software to treat diseases. One important aspect of healthcare is Patient Management. IT systems have to be developed which can support management at an enormous scale. Any development of such good software system requires data which is as realistic as possible but not real. There has to be a fine balance between privacy and enabling developers to anticipate the myriad health scenarios that may occur. Towards this initiative, healthcare industry has been standardizing around the HL7 (Health Level 7) protocol. The HL7 protocol itself has undergone transformation from pipe-based formats (v2.x) to JSON/XML based (FHIR) modern formats. FHIR is the future of HL7 messages and is being increasingly adopted. However given the slow nature and reluctance by healthcare providers to change or upgrade their systems, a majority of hospitals still use the HL7 2.3 format.

FHIR is a modern format. There are lots of tools available to simulate patient data in FHIR format including the wonderful open-source Synthea tool which runs through a fictional patients entire life journey creating fake encounters, observations and such. However to my surprise, there are not many tools which can generate data in v2.3 legacy format.

So I took this as an opportunity to create a tool of my own - MayaMaker. This is an open-source GPL-licensed tool which uses Synthea data and NHAPI library to introduce scheduling algorithms between a patient's encounters to create fake ADT (Admission, Discharge, Transfer) messages. One can generate messages for one encounter or all the encounters that a person may have in their lifetime. You can view the source code on Github or view the live demo site here - https://mayamaker.azurewebsites.net/. If you need to automate the message generation, there is an API available here - https://mayamaker.azurewebsites.net/swagger/index.html

Hope this tool is a small step in helping software professionals in healthcare industry and make the world a better place.

(Pull Requests welcome!)
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