HL7 object model for .NET

Question

Searching for a library or framework that would provide an object model, parsing, validating, etc

The idea would be to be able to spin up a new object of type hl7 v2 or v3. Then perhaps call it message type ORU_R01 or ADT, or ORM.

Wouldn't life be great if we were able to do something like this:

HL7V2 myMessage = new HL7V2();
myMessage.Type = V2MsgTypes.ORU_R01;
myMessage.TryParse(someHL7_string);

if (myMessage.IsValid)
{
  //do some work
  //maybe access the PID segment
  if (myMessage.Patient.Names.FamilyName =="Johnson")
  {
    //do more work
  }
}

Answer 1

You want nHAPI I used it on a project previously, and it worked great. The fact that it's open source saved my bacon too, as one of the input sources didn't precisely follow the HL7 spec, so I had to hack on the source a little bit to make nHAPI's parser allow those messages (as I couldn't change them).

Answer 2

Orion Helth has a toolkit called Symphonia which does something similar. There is also Chameleon toolset from Interfaceware which does the same.

Answer 3

I've used nHAPI too and it works great. However you might need to watch out for some quirky behavior w.r.t escaping special characters. I've also had to manually hack the HL7 string to update some fields that were inaccessible using the object model.

Answer 4

Hi,

 I am trying to generate HL7 CDA xml document from entity classes generated from CDA.XSD. Can any body help me on this.

Thanks, James,