Abstract

On March 13, 2008, Friendly Pharmacy in Charlottetown made a small but significant piece of Canadian healthcare history. It was the first drugstore to go online with Prince Edward Island's Drug Information System (DIS), the centrepiece of the province's All Drugs All People program. PEI is the first province to implement a DIS solution using a common pan-Canadian messaging standard based on Health Level 7 Version 3 (HL7 V3), an internationally recognized set of standards for clinical, financial and administrative messaging. HL7 V3 allows for interoperability, permitting different information systems to not only exchange information but, more importantly, understand and use it in computer-supported algorithms such as clinical decision support.