Design and implementation of a web-based HL7 validation system

Computer and communication technologies are progressing rapidly in these few years, which speeds up the electronic medical record (EMR) development and increases the requirement of electronic data interchange (EDI) among healthcare organizations. Although the health data exchange standard of Health Level 7(HL7) has been presented more than a decade, hospitals apply the standard of data transfer only in these few years with little experience. Because the quality of the hospital information system (HIS) varies in each institution, it is difficulty to judge whether the transmitted data match with the standards completely. If there is any mistake in the exchanged data, it will cause problems to the whole information system as well as to patient records. It is necessary to have a validation mechanism to verify the integrity of the data before data exchange. In this paper, we introduce the method of implementing a web-based validation system providing HL7 messages test services. This method may accept and parse HL7 messages and warn the errors in segments, sequences, required fields, field length, components, data types and valid values. The system is ready for HL7 version 2.3. Besides benefiting to health care organizations, the system may as well provide assistance to students who major in medical informatics.