HL7 Message Document? - format

Question

Is there a tool which can take 1000 Seperate HL7 Messages and combine them into a single document for 7edit? I need to run a test, and if I can do one document and choose send all, it will be better than me running it manually for each of these 1000 messages.

Answer 1

Yes, There exist a way to combine those messages in a single file. You can do that using any integration engine, I will take Mirth in this case.
Follow these steps in sequential order
Download Mirth Connect from here using the .exe installer (in case you don't have it).
Setup your account and do initial configuration on your local system.
Create a Channel called Appending Channel, put Source inbound and outbound connector as HL7v2.x.
Go to Source Tab, Put Connector type as File Reader. Give the location of the directory where your messages will reside(D:\x\read in my case). Make sure you have the directory shared
You can make Delete file after read as a Yes, which will prune the files after they are read from this location.If you do a NO, then specify where you want to move those files to.
Put Process Batch files as a No.
Go to Destinations tab, create a Destination called as Appender and make it a File Writer type.
Give the directory(D:\x\Output in my case) where your final file will be placed.Give the file name as final.txt.
Choose Append on the file exists tab.
In Template, Drag Raw Data from the list on the right hand side, and put it here or else what you can do is type ${message.rawData} in the template section.
Save Channel and Deploy it.
Place all your messages in the read folder (mentioned above), and wait for Mirth to poll the folder (default setting is 1000 ms).
Once that is done, go to final.txt to see all the messages appended in the same file.
The downside is that even though this process is 100 percent working, the message thus appended will not be seperated by any means. So it will look like below
|2688684|||||||||||||||||||||||||199912271408||||||002376853MSH|^~\&|EPIC|EPICADT|
^ End of first message

Answer 2

You don't need any tool for that. 7edit is able to read multi-message files. You just need to append each message into one single text file like this (two ADT messages):
MSH|^~\&|SystemA|CompanyA|SystemB|CompanyB|20121116122025||ADT^A01|101|T|2.5||||||UNICODE UTF-8
EVN|A01|20130823080958
PID|||1000||Lastname^Firstname
PV1||I
MSH|^~\&|SystemA|CompanyA|SystemB|CompanyB|20121116122026||ADT^A01|102|T|2.5||||||UNICODE UTF-8
EVN|A01|20130823080958
PID|||1000||Lastname^Firstname
PV1||I
Open this file with 7edit and you will see this (multiple messages):
Now you can send all messages at once by pressing on Send and then select All Messages:
It is that simple - no other tool necessary (just to make the append in one file maybe)

Answer 3

You could also try to use HL7Browser (www.nule.org), a tool that is similar to 7Edit, with less features but free.
You should be able to open many single HL7 messages files, HL7Browser will cache them in its viewer and should allow you to save them all to a single file.
Hope helps
Davide

Answer 4

if you have multiple HL7 files in one folder and want to combine them into 1 hl7 file, you can do following:
create a batch file in this folder named combine.cmd
write following into this batch file
del combined.hl7
for %%f in (*.hl7) do type "%%f" >> combined.hl
move combined.hl combined.hl7
run this batch file
result: all hl7 files in this folder are combined into a single file called "combined.hl7"