HL7 medical data exchange

[xoomaster]

Is there any Plugins or developer working on or willing to develop a product for export/Import in HL7 format ? Although FMP is used in health care, I can't find any Plugins or support with this : (

Any help is appreciated.

Xoomaster

Edited February 16, 2008 by Guest

[Tim Griffith]

HL7 is is the structuring method for exchanging medical messages. It is not a data object, per se, and would not warrant a plug in. It is a structured class library that, as it cascades down its structure, begins to incorporate fields. Instead of a plug in, you need to gather the information and create a data structure. A group called HL7 (hl7.org) is the source of all the information. They are rather pricey- to get the information at reduced prices you must be a member (pricey), or the info not as a member, at last glance, was 1400 USD.

The transmission and receiving can be done in many different ways, FTP, xml calls, email... Basically, a version 2.x HL7 is strictly formatted text...

MSH|^~\&|ASCEND|1|AccMgr|1|200501122200||DFT^P03|DFT48390|P|2.3|1|||||| EVN|P03|200501122200||||| PID|||10006579||DUCK^DONALD D||19241010|M|||111 DUCK ST^^FOWL^CA^99999||^^^^^^8885551212|||||40007716|139129819||||||||||| PV1||I|IN1^214^1||||59^BEAR^FOZZIE|||||||||||I|||||||||||||||||||||1|||||200501100452|200501121520|||||||

The MSH is the message header (a segment)... '|' is the field separator, but the following characters ^~\& are separators also (I just noticed that the sample above has an error, there should be a ^ between DONALD and D, without it, the first name is DONALD D, and there is no middle initial- plus, the segment is therefore one ^ short and should cause the parsing to halt- thus rejecting the import of data and triggering and error response to the sender!)... the next segment is EVN... it is the event that triggered the message in the first place... PID is the Patient ID, many fields in that one... so on and so forth...

The Classes- EVENTS, MESSAGES, SEGMENTS, SEGMENT DETAILS, DATA TYPES, DATA TYPE DETAILS and SUPPORT TABLES. Events trigger messages, messages have segments, segments have sub segments (segment details)- each segment detail is a data type- a data type is, as it says, a data type (ie TS = timestamp), but some data types are actually another level of fields (a sub-sub-segment, as it were), some segments and data types use supporting tables- the info in the supporting tables can have data types- including the multi field data type! It gets very busy at the bottom! Add to that- there are 7 current versions of HL7 in use. The sending and receiving servers must agree upon which version they are using before exchange takes place.

I have tried gathering the EVN, MSG, SEG, DAT info from the web. There's a lot out there- but nothing has ever proved comprehensive. I've created a quite elegant parser in FMP11 that is strictly driven by the info in the segment detail layer. Works well. But since the collected data is incomplete, it will not parse every message. I am currently filling in the data holes. I am attaching my basic UML diagram. Hope this helps.