iWay Intelligent Adapter for HL7

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What Is HL7?

Health Level Seven (HL7) is an application protocol for electronic data exchange of information in healthcare environments. HL7 is a collection of standard formats used by vendors of hospital information systems, clinical laboratory systems, enterprise systems, and pharmacy systems. HL7 standardizes the protocols and structure for exchanging key sets of health data at the application level, which is the seventh level of the ISO open systems model.

Background on Health Level Seven Standard

The HL7 Standards Organization was founded in 1987 to develop standards for the electronic interchange of administrative, clinical, and financial information among independent healthcare-oriented systems and to support clinical patient care and the management, delivery, and evaluation of healthcare services. The HL7 Standards Organization was designated an accredited ANSI standards developer in June 1994.

Accelerating HL7 Generation, Integration, and Compliance

The iWay Intelligent Adapter for HL7 integrates into an existing enterprise infrastructure through the iWay Service Manager, which provides the ability to parse, generate, and transform HL7 messages. HL7 messages may be generated from existing legacy applications and databases. Information extracted from HL7 messages may be used in conjunction with technologies such as J2EE™ application servers, integration brokers, .NET™ applications, and additional iWay adapters to integrate HL7 documents with other information systems. The iWay Service Manager provides a drag-and-drop interface and transformation mapping templates for rapid HL7 integration with internal enterprise systems, or external entities such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), other healthcare organizations, and bioterrorism response systems. Supported environments include Microsoft BizTalk Server, BEA WebLogic Server, IBM WebSphere, IBM WebSphere MQ, Oracle9i Application Server, and Oracle AS10g.

Standards Support

iWay Software, the standards leader in enterprise application integration, is committed to the support and maintenance of the HL7 message format. This dedicated support allows healthcare organizations to offload many of the maintenance issues associated with upgrading from one HL7 version to another, and gives them the ability to collaborate with each other regardless of specific HL7 versioning.

Accelerate Legacy Integration

The real cost of HL7 compliance is in the integration of back-end systems across heterogeneous platforms, databases, and transaction processing systems. The entire healthcare industry needs to deliver and receive HL7 messages into their business processes and internal systems. These systems are often based on legacy technologies such as CICS, VSAM, IMS, and Model 204. iWay Softwares virtually code-free legacy adapters, part of a 300 -plus adapter suite, significantly reduces the time and cost of integrating back-end systems and provides a less risky solution than competing vendors and the roll-your-own approach.

Scalability and Heterogeneity

iWay Softwares HL7 adapter is multi-threaded and runs on virtually any platform or operating system. The iWay HL7 adapter supports the J2EE and/or .NET foundations and is available on Windows operating systems, UNIX, Linux, and OS/390 platforms, which enables it to be implemented in any particular technical architecture. iWay Software is the only HL7 adapter vendor that can offer the ability to scale an integration project from the Windows platform to the mainframe and bridge an HL7 collaboration between .NET and J2EE environments.

Key Features

The iWay Software HL7 adapter offers these advantages:

Parses and serializes HL7 messages into segments, fields, components, and subcomponents. Empowers users with full XML schemas to all HL7 messages, segments, fields, and data types for all versions
Provides XML DTD and XML schema validations and the ability to apply custom validation rules when parsing messages
Provides support for user-defined variations in HL7 messages, including support for Z segments and Z messages and the ability to mark any field or segment as required or optional
Allows HL7 and other message formats to coexist and complement one another through powerful transformation capabilities
Allows user-defined variations to any part of HL7 for example, making a required field optional, rearranging segments in a message, or using fields for custom implementations
Accepts HL7 messages from files, message queues, and TCP/IP, or via Web services
Supports non-standard real-world custom implementations of HL7
Automatically creates all required HL7 acknowledgements and fully adheres to HL7 rules for original mode acknowledgements
Automatically parses and transforms HL7 messages into logically tagged XML documents. Creates well-structured, fully hierarchical XML documents that include groups and repeating segments, fields, etc.

Software and System Requirements

Platforms supported: OS/390 and z/OS, OS/390 and z/OS USS, Linux/390, UNIX, and Windows operating systems. Please call or e-mail iWay Software to discuss your environment and needs.

For More Information

No other company provides the kind of sophisticated data integration and SOA-based integration technology that iWay Software does. To find out more, call toll-free (866) 297-4929 or e-mail us at info@iwaysoftware.com.