hl7 components for .net

Question

I havea windows service built in .net which must build some hl7, send it off over tcp/ip, receive an ack. Are there any free libraries for doing this. I could probably handle the tcp/ip part myself, but if I can find a good library that at least has all the parsing logic to just deliver me a class instance representing the message that would save me a lot of work.

Answer 1

by chance have you looked at NHapi? ...and another userful link -- Using C# to Send A HL7 Message

Answer 2

I would recommend taking a look at Mirth. Setup e.g. a SOAP listener and send XML thru that. Define the HL7 transformations you need in Mirth and have it send the HL7 messages. You'll never find anything in .Net that matches what Mirth provides. And, yes it is free to use and not that difficult to master.

Answer 3

If you are sending just a few different message types, then a simple solution would be to build up the hl7 yourself; this is especially true if you have example messages, from your destination systems. You can create templates from your sample messages, with place holders for information that needs to be added at runtime. You can simply send your messages using tcpip.

Answer 4

The post on Coding Headache is quite short. Here's another blog with some more information on nHapi that you could use. From a .Net perspective you could use Biztalk, that has some Hl7 support or use nHapi (that is an open source product).

http://www.dib0.nl/component/tag/nhapi