urHL7: An HL7 parsing and manipulation library

With increasing pace, hospitals and other healthcare entities are adopting technology to assist with workflow and data handling. While many benefits can be realized from this, working with disparate legacy and emerging systems can be problematic. Most critical is the handling of information that is transferred between these many systems. Incorrect interpretation of data can lead to problems as “simple” as incorrect billing or as severe as those dealing with human life. Historically, message oriented middleware and the HL7 message format have provided the framework for the necessary information exchange. While this approach is robust, it is also cumbersome requiring many hours of very specific coding effort to solve even simple problems. This once-appropriate approach is inconsistent with our current needs for agility and flexibility in enterprise computing systems. Some tools and libraries have emerged to help address this situation, but each has limitations. In this paper we describe the landscape that necessitates these tools, examine some of the current tools, and offer an alternative that is an open-source library leveraging native Java objects and methods to: parse raw HL7 version 2 message data to internal data structures, provide an API to allow for the efficient and simple access and manipulation of underlying data elements in the HL7 version 2 data, minimize the complexity of standard I/O functions that are generally required when working with HL7 version 2 messages, and create a durable, reusable core library that can be expanded upon with extensions.