Question: More Starting with HL7

Nov 19, 2013

Question:

I am working in a web based startup which deals with health care data and I am looking specifically at how to import/export certain data in HL7 compliant manner.

I read your post “Question : Starting with HL7” and it was really helpful and also looked at different questions people already asked. Thanks for the responses.

I have spent last few days in reading documentation on HL7 from official site and I must say its a huge amount of info to process. It seems most of the existing system are using 2.X version so it would be a wise choice to start with 2.7 protocol?

I wanted to ask you if you could point me to a simple tutorial or blog which shows how to implement the steps you mentioned in “Starting with HL7” post. I am just looking for a simple example which can just show for example how to import/export minimum patient info(may be Id, First and last name).

I also wanted to ask if there are tools or APIs I can use to avoid reinventing the wheel. We are using Java technology stack. I found some Java APIs which claim to help in implementation of HL7 but I wanted take your opinion about it. What APIs I should look to which can help me in reuse instead of rewrite.

I provided as much detail as I could :) I know it might be more than you expect in a single question. Thanks for reading it.

Answer:

Yes, a great deal of information to process.

Some comments on the above:

  • importing/exporting patient info isn’t directly easy - you have to implement ADT messaging (chapter 3) and then figure out which events you are going to be implementing. Ao1? A08? (that’s for import). Or are you going to be doing query (A19?) Probably, you will have to do something different at each site..
  • Tools - since you say Java, then there’s two choices:HAPI, or the code I wrote for Eclipse (org.eclipse.ohf.hl7.v2). But the HAPI code has a big community around it, where as my code doesn’t, so the obvious thing to do would be to use HAPI
  • v2.7 isn’t being used in the wild to my knowledge. I regularly see v2.4, and once I’ve seen 2.5. If I was in USA, I’d see 2.5.1 a lot. But that may not be the right question - it depends on how you implement. The way v2.x works, version is somewhat optional, and I, for instance, mostly use v2.5 as my implementation base, and just process extra fields that the infrastructure doesn’t know as I see fit - but you need infrastructure that knows how to behave like that. I don’t know if HAPI does