Medical records data - HL7

I keep thinking about a career adjustment - basically converting from more general applications development to more specialized applications.  I had considered going back to college for a masters degree in bioinformatics and trying to start over from there.  I decided that was too much disruption to my family mainly for just my benefit - at least while my kids are young.  I have considered trying to learn HL7 (mainly v3) and look for an appropriate job opportunity.  That is by the fact that my current employment takes more time than I care to admit and to the detriment of my family as well some days. 

[Update] I decided that it is more practical to look into career paths more inline with my existing eduction and some other interests.  I still find it useful to understand the technology as you never know when it will come in handy in some way.

I have looking into HL7 for a year or 2.  This was challenging since there was little freely available information/tools.  In the meantime, some of basic information is now more freely available along with a few tools.  The only other major hurdle is that I would likely learn using freely available Java resources whereas it seems, based on job postings, that most jobs are doing .NET solutions (or mainframe).  Learning .NET (versus just C/C++ on Windows from years ago) is on my list to do but time consuming as well.  My current job will likely require an increasing amount of .NET work so given time.. but this is off topic a bit.

I'm trying to keep a list of potentially useful resources (with a majority of focus on freely available resources) to learn/utilize.  I have not reviewed any of these in more than passing at this time.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Level_7
• http://www.hl7.org/participate/toolsandresources.cfm
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/hl7inspector/
• http://www.openehealth.org/display/ipf2/Home

I would have liked to join in some free webinars related to HL7 but so far they have always occurred at times when I was not able to take off from work (nor could I really justify it during my normal work day since it is not really related to my current employment).

Finding realistic sample data to learn from may be challenging.  Anyways, even if this doesn't lead to a job change, I think it is still a worthwhile to stretch my knowledge into other areas.  I find it quite amazing when some seemingly unrelated information helps me with a current difficult task.

 I'll hopefully add more interesting and useful content related to this over time.