Health Level Seven (HL7) is an organization that develops messaging standard specifications that enable disparate health care applications to exchange key sets of clinical and administrative data. The HL7 standard provides an electronic interchange of clinical, financial, and administrative information among independent health care oriented computer systems, such as hospital information systems, clinical laboratory systems, enterprise systems, and pharmacy systems.

HL7 standard provides a layout of messages exchanged between two or more applications. A message is comprised of multiple segments that must be sent in a particular order which may or may not repeat. Segments are collections of data elements that typically share a common subject. For example, the PID segment contains patient identification data elements such as name, address, and social security number. The NK1 next to kin segment contains similar data elements about the patient's next to kin.

HL7 defines the data elements that must be sent and determines the data type and the suggested length for each data element. Also, it indicates whether the data element is required, optional, or may be repeated. Fields must be sent in the same order as present in the Standard. This way, both sending and receiving systems know the data that is expected, the order, and the format. HL7 also enables one system to query another system for the relevant information.

You can obtain a HL7 (eDoc) schema file from HL7 that contains the structure for your HL7 file connections. If your HL7 file structure is different, you may have to modify the template.

To obtain a template file, contact your sales representative. These template files are standard schemas.

To connect to an HL7 source or target file, you must set a schema in the SchemaFile property.

This section provides information that is specific to the connector.

It is important to define the structure of your HL7 files before opening them in the integration platform. This is because HL7 files may be loosely structured and most often must have additional rules applied to them.

The HL7 connector works with one message at a time. Files containing two or more messages must be split to process them. Each message begins with a MSH segment and the MSH must exist only once in a message as the first segment. HL7 is a real time messaging interface, where discrete messages are generated and routed immediately to their destination. Some users employ a batch mode process, where multiple messages are written to a single file before transport occurs. This is not the intended use for HL7. Split batch files into discrete messages before processing.

You can set the following source (S) and target (T) properties.

Options are as follows: