Has anyone here ever tried to write an HL7 interface from scratch? If you have then you know that it's difficult and time-consuming. We developed an HL7 toolkit that is very powerful for our own customers and have decided to make it available to developers worldwide, it was designed for HL7 developers and is available for download at http://www.hermetechnz.com. You can look at the API and documentation at http://www.hermetechnz.com/documenta...C20/index.html .

The worldwide HL7 community has been striving for years to get medical software developers to adopt HL7 as a data transfer platform and have succeeded (for the most part). The main problem is that for those of us that have smaller market share than our larger, more popular brethren, our choices have been somewhat limited. As a developer of an EMR (Electronic Medical Record) product, I have found myself many times at the mercy of a company larger than my own when it came to interfacing via HL7. I found the solution to this was to have a flexible HL7 RAD (Rapid Application Development) toolkit that would allow me to develop interfaces quickly to other vendors, even if their HL7 implementation was, shall we say, 'Quirky' (LabCorp, stop hiding, you know who you are). Give it a try, or I invite anyone that has a better solution to propose it.

I'm working on a project that involves receiving, parsing, applying simple transformations, and then sending HL7 messages on to a data hub. My predecessor introduced EasyHL7 as a tool, and I'm currently waiting on the powers that be to purchase a developer license. It looks like it will do what we need quite well.

However, there is also a need for a configuration tool to configure the transforms to apply to the message (they are all field-level, and not complex). What I'd like to be able to do is to give the user the ability to select an event/message combination (i.e., ADT/A08) and then display the list of segments that might occur for that combination. The user could then select the segments that the message source actually sends. From that base, transforms could be applied to selected fields of the segments (these are things like date formatting, capitalization, and message suppression based on certain field values).

This requires metadata that does not appear to be present in EasyHL7. Is that correct? If so, do you know where it might be available? Thanks in advance.

It seems you and your team had done a good job. Congrats.