eiConsole for Healthcare – Lenient Parsing (Demo)

Click for a video overview

Sample1 Data

Sample2 Data

This is a demonstration of the eiConsole for Healthcare’s HL7 Lenient Parsing capability. Many systems and organizations require or produce non-standards compliant HL7. HL7 middleware that is lacking a Lenient Parsing capability is crippled in these all too common scenarios – it renders the software useless. While other products may choke on these HL7 messages, the eiConsole for Healthcare’s new Lenient HL7 Parser can parse unknown segments – capturing the data for subsequent transformation and manipulation.

The eiConsole’s Lenient Parsing capability is exposed and enabled simply by selecting the HL7 v2.X transformer from the Transformation Module drop-down. Out-of-the-box, this component now has the capability to parse anything that looks remotely like an HL7 v2.X message.

Switch to the Testing Mode and select the Start Test Here and End Test After Here checkboxes in the Source Transform Stage.

Let’s take a look at 2 examples. In the first example, we’ll choose an HL7 input file that includes a Custom-Segment that’s not a part of the HL7 data dictionary.

Click on the Execute Test button.

Here’s the input to the process. You’ll see we have what is largely a standard HL7 message with one invented custom segment with a segment identifier, ABC. Most tools will simply fail when trying to convert this into an XML or parsed representation.

However, with Lenient Parsing, we can see that we can convert the message to XML, including our custom segment.

Let’s look at one more example. This time, we’ll choose an HL7 document where, instead of including a completely unknown segment, we have a modified segment that doesn’t match the definition in the HL7 vocabulary.

Again, let’s take a look at the input. Here at the end of the last segment, we see a complex set of fields, components, and sub-components that are not a part of the standard.

Reviewing the output of the Transformation Module, we can see how this data is captured so that it can be mapped to other data formats and further manipulated downstream.

As we’ve shown, the Lenient Parsing capability of the eiConsole for Healthcare fills a vital gap in interoperability for healthcare. Organizations that have customized HL7 to suit their very specific requirements, and as a result produce non-standards compliant HL7, will now be able to communicate with all entities in the healthcare ecosystem.