Query message store of mirth connect

Question

Can I use mirth connect to store millions of HL7v2 messages (pipe delimited) and query them programmatically by our third party software application at a later point of time?

What's the best way to do that? Is mirth's REST API capable to query its message store efficently?

Unfortunatly I need a running mirth connect instance to browse the REST API documentation according to the manual at page 368. (If it wouldn't require to have a running instance of mirth to browse the documentation of the REST API I wouldn't have asked that question. Is there a mirth connect instance available on the internet to play with? Or would somebody be so kind to post the relevant REST API documentation for that question?)

So far, those are the scenarios I came up yet:

Answer 1

There are two misconceptions here:

• HL7v2 message is triggered by the real-world event, called the trigger event, on the placer (sender) side. It expects some activity to happen on the filler (receiver) side by either confirming the message, replying with the query response, etc. I.e., HL7v2 supports data flow among systems.

• Mirth Connect is HL7 interface engine aimed at transforming incoming feeds in one format (e.g., HL7v2 in ER7 format) into outgoing feeds in another format (which could be another HL7v2, or XML, or database, etc.). It does not store anything except a configured portion of messages for audit purposes.

Now, to implement a solution you outlined, Mirth Connect or any other transformation mechanism has to implement two flows: receive, convert if needed and store incoming messages; provide an interface to query those messages.

This is obviously can be done with Mirth Connect but your initial question if Mirth is capable in storing millions of records is incorrect. In fact it's recommended to keep as less messages as possible to speed up Mirth processing (each processed message is stored in the Mirth internal database several times depending on configuration). Thus, all transformed messages are going into the external public or private message storage exactly as shown on your diagrams.

Answer 2

Mirth is integration engine, and its strength is processing messages. Browsing historical messages can be at times difficult or slow, depending on the storage settings for the channel and whether or not you take care to pull additional information out during processing to store in "custom metadata" fields. The custom metadata fields are not indexed by default, but you can add your own (mirth supports several back-end databases, including postgres, mysql, oracle, and mssql.) Searching the message content basically involves doing a full-text search and scanning. Filter options to reduce scan time, apart from the custom metadata you create, are mostly related to the message properties (datetime received, status, etc..) and not the content.

So, I would not recommend it for the use-case you are suggesting.

However, Mirth could definitely be used to convert your messages (batched from files or live) to xml which could be put in a database designed to handle and query large volumes of xml documents. I assume when you say HL7 you mean the ER7 (pipe delimited) format of HL7v2. Mirth automatically does the conversion to xml for those types of messages as they are handled as xml during processing. You could easily create a new parent node that holds both the converted xml and the original message string as children.

If the database you choose has a JDBC driver, Java SDK, or HTTP/REST API, mirth can likely directly insert the converted messages for you as it processes them.