Topic outline

• HL7 V2 QuickStart

  HL7 V2 QuickStart

  Content Type
  Exercise

  Duration
  5m

  Level
  Introductory

  InterSystems IRIS® for Health provides a platform for building scalable applications for healthcare interoperability. Each instance of InterSystems IRIS for Health comes with:

  • An integration engine for routing and transforming HL7® V2 messages
  • An API management tool for automating API endpoint creation
  • Security management tools for multiple users and roles
  • A multi-model database for resource storage and retrieval
  • Data analytics capabilities for making sense of HL7 V2 messages

  See how to set up an HL7 V2 application built on InterSystems IRIS for Health.

  • Want to see how this is done? Watch this demonstration.

  • Mark me "complete" for this exercise.

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• Start the Exercise

  Start the Exercise

  In the following tasks, you will review and launch an HL7 V2 application capable of receiving HL7 V2 messages. The application has been built for a small clinic that needs to route messages among their registration, research, lab, and billing facilities. Their application performs the following tasks:

  • Watches an inbound file folder for HL7 V2 messages coming from registration
  • Modifies incoming messages with updated information about the time
  • Routes updated messages to several endpoints:
    • Registered patient info is saved to a database along with the current time.
    • Observation requests are sent to the clinic's lab.
    • Billing-related information is sent to an external billing service.

  • Launch your lab

    Use the online lab provided to complete this exercise. To try the exercise locally, visit the GitHub repository and follow along with the README.

  • You must be logged in to launch an InterSystems IRIS instance.

    • Log in with your existing account.
    • Don't have an InterSystems account? Create a new account.
  • Send an HL7 V2 message to the application for transformation and routing

    1. Open Visual Studio Code using the icon on the desktop, and expand the /quickstarts-hl7/directory in the Explorer pane.
       This folder is mapped to share data with a directory within the InterSystems IRIS for Health instance.
    2. Copy and paste the HL7 V2 message ADT_A01.txt from the quickstarts-hl7/data/sample_data/ directory into the quickstarts-hl7/data/registration/ directory.
       The message should disappear from the registration/ directory after it is processed by the production.
    3. Find the directory quickstarts-hl7/data/archive/ and notice that the incoming message has been copied here for future reference.
    Locate the quickstarts-hl7/data/billing/ directory and the quickstarts-hl7/data/lab/ directory, which should contain outgoing HL7 V2 messages.
    As you can see, the production has transformed the message differently for each endpoint. You can verify this by opening the messages in a text editor and comparing them.
  • Explore the HL7 V2 application to track and view HL7 V2 messages

    The Management Portal is the landing page for managing any InterSystems IRIS instance.

    1. Open the InterSystems IRIS Management Portal using the icon on the desktop, and log in using the credentials tech/demo.
    2. In the header bar of the Management Portal, switch namespaces to INTEROP.
    3. Navigate to the Production Configuration interface: Interoperability > Configure > Production. If HL7QS.Production is not already running, click Start at the top of the page.
       
       This production has been built from the HL7 V2 production template provided with all instances of InterSystems IRIS for Health. Here, you can develop and monitor the pieces of the HL7 V2 production and the messages that are processed by it. Notice there are three columns: Services, Processes, and Operations.
       
       The architecture of this application follows from the standard architecture of an InterSystems IRIS for Health production. As you can see below, the leftmost column contains the services for data input, the middle column contains data transformation and routing, and the rightmost column handles data output.
       
       
       In the Message Viewer, you can see the HL7 V2 messages that have been passed between components.
    
    
    4. Select the business service fromRegFile, then click the Messages tab in the right-most pane.
    5. Click Go to Message Viewer and select one of the messages that was sent.
    6. Click the Contents tab, where you can see the full contents of the incoming HL7 V2 message.
       Note that the raw text of the input file has been interpreted based on a designated HL7 V2 schema. Clicking on a field will bring you to the schema definition.
       
    
    
    7. With a message selected in the Message Viewer, select Trace > View Full Trace.
       This contains a diagram of all of the messages, services, processes, and operations in a single session of this production—that is, all the events resulting from a given call to fromRegFile.
    8. Look at the SQL Explorer to make sure PatientRegDBOperation has saved the information extracted from the HL7 V2 message.
       1. Return to the Management Portal home.
       2. Ensure the namespace is INTEROP.
       3. Navigate to System Explorer > SQL, and click Go.
          When data has been created or objects have been saved, the tables may be viewed here.
       4. In the Execute Query tab, retrieve the PatientReg data by executing the following query:Select * from HL7QS.PatientReg
          The table only includes a few columns with data extracted from the HL7 V2 message.

    Now you have seen a simple way to process HL7 V2 data using InterSystems IRIS for Health. The application accepts HL7 V2 data, transforms it, and routes it to several endpoints. Using the Management Portal interfaces, you can easily trace the flow of data through the application and view the contents of a message as it is processed.

• What's Next?

  What's Next?
  • Continue working with this code to build a basic integration (exercise, 45m).
  • See how to use multiple data models in InterSystems IRIS (exercise, 10m).
  • Learn the basics of connecting systems using interoperability productions (documentation, 15m).

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