dotnet HL7 integration library

Question

Hi All,

I have a medical health database that a 3rd party needs to connect to.

We need to look at using the HL7 standards.

I am looking for a good library to make using HL7 easier in a dotnet enviroment.

I will need a comprehensive 2.x and 3.x lib that can do most of the heavy lifting.

I want to try and avoid using message parsing and would rather use an object model as much as possible.

I have seen http://nhapi.sourceforge.net/ but this only seems to go to v2.x and not 3.x.

Has any one used this library adn what was your feelings about this? was it useful adn productive?

Any suggestions are welcome.

Opensource or comercial are both good.

thanks

Answer 1

At my last job, we created our own HL7 library because the open source offerings weren't up to snuff.

We only had to be 2.x compliant. My understanding is that there are not too many systems on the 3.x standard, but that may just have been the particular systems we were interacting with (mostly big lab companies).

It's not really that difficult to write a good HL7 library - the spec is pretty clear so as long as you have adequate unit tests you can be confident the implementation is correct.

If you'll be receiving messages, you will undoubtedly have to deal with parsing the incoming data. Unless you're a huge organization you cannot expect other system to send you an object graph - it's going to be a text message and you'll have to parse it accordingly.

Bottom line, if I were you I'd either write my own or look into contributing 3.x support to NHapi.

Answer 2

I've rolled my own .NET HL7 engine in the past. Just mapped each line/segment to an object (normally HL7 line) property with a ToHL7 and FromHL7 in each class for reading/writing class data to a HL7 line.

Answer 3

I am also trying to generate patient summary documents in HL7 CDA standards. Can anybody help me on this?

Answer 4

http://www.ganilo.net/hl7kit/hl7kit_products.html