PilotFish’s HL7 Parser Deftly Handles the Rampant Deviations in HL7 Usage

Across healthcare, it’s acknowledged that HL7 2.x is a non-standard standard. PilotFish’s HL7 Interface Engine IDE offers a custom lenient HL7 2.x parser capable of immediately ingesting virtually any version or interpretation of an HL7 message, without wasting time in the cumbersome modeling of messages.

Solution providers constantly deal with healthcare systems and organizations that require and produce non-standards-compliant HL7. Unfortunately, in the “wild”, HL7 tools that lack a lenient parsing capability are immediately compromised in the face of non-compliant and extended HL7 2.x messages, rendering such software practically useless. While other HL7 tools are incapable of processing these non-standard HL7 messages, PilotFish’s lenient HL7 Parser deftly parses unknown segments, capturing the data for subsequent transformation and manipulation.

Leverage the HL7 Interface Engine That Can Easily Consume Non-Standards Compliant HL7

The eiConsole’s Lenient Parsing capability is exposed and enabled by merely selecting the HL7 v2.X transformer from the Transformation Module drop-down.

In this example, we have a mostly standard HL7 message with one invented custom segment with a segment identifier, ABC. Most tools will simply fail when trying to convert this custom segment into an XML or parsed representation.

However, with the lenient parsing component, it’s easy to quickly convert the message to XML – including the custom segment.

Out-of-the-box, PilotFish’s lenient parsing component handles anything that looks and “smells” even remotely like an HL7 v2.X message – including “byzantine” sets of fields, components, and sub-components that are not part of the standard. You can follow the process as applied to an Altered-HL7 Segment as well as to this Custom-HL7 Segment in this 2-minute demo video.

Video Demo of PilotFish’s Lenient HL7 Parser (2 min)

PilotFish’s eiConsole Healthcare Interface Engine IDE is rich with HL7 productivity-boosting features alongside the valuable lenient HL7 Parser. These include the exclusive:

• HL7 Friendly Name option to bind HL7 messages to a more human-readable XML representation
• Embedded HL7 Vocabulary Tool to save users from time-wasting tasks in tracking fields

PilotFish is incredibly robust and can handle every data format and connection you’ll ever encounter in healthcare. Proven in practice, it has conquered every integration challenge ever thrown at it in the complex world of HL7 interfaces.

Go to HL7 Interface Engine Features to learn more about our HL7 Tools and the eiConsole for Healthcare IDE.

The eiConsole for Healthcare Interface Engine IDE and its Lenient HL7 Parser component are part of the PilotFish Interface Development Life Cycle – a complete system for building, maintaining, testing and deploying interfaces.

Download a FREE 90-Day Trial now, or contact us for a custom demo.

HL7 is the registered trademark of Health Level Seven International.