Summary

Health Level Seven (HL7) is the standard for exchanging information between medical applications. This application receives HL7 messages from Hospital Information Systems (HIS). These messages allow us to keep track of the location of each patient.

Description

If you have not seen HL7 before, it can look a little ugly the first time. Here is a message.

MSH|^~&|P2000|POH|TVIF||20100301185944|N|ADT^A01|01|T|2.3
EVN|A01|20100301185943|||scosby
PID|||399599|399599|FLINTSTONE^FRED^K||194807070000|M||W|2915 STONE LN^^WATERFORD^MI^48329||(248)111-2222|||||7000103191|777-88-9999
PV1||I|7E^7028^B||||01195^FLINTSTONE^PEBBLES^P|||REH||||||N|01195^FLINTSTONE^PEBBLES^P|3||T||||||||||||||||||||||||201003011857
GT1|||FLINTSTONE^FRED^K||2915 STONE LN^^WATERFORD^MI^48329^USA|(248)111-2222|||M

You can see names, addresses, and phone numbers in the message. The “7E^7028^B” is the assigned patient location (PointOfCare/Room/Bed). HL7 is extremely detailed. For births, it even identifies the birth order of each child.
Our software receives thousands of these messages per day. I wrote the library code that breaks these messages into something our software can use.

TODO: Code Samples and Screen shots.

Technology

• C#