HL7 Diff

The one thing we need to get straight is that this type of HL doesn’t stand for Half-Life, and isn’t even related to gaming at all. What it does have to do with is medical systems in general, which use different providers for programs. As such, HL or Health Level-7 became a set of international standards to increase compatibility between data types, and this application lets you compare them.

A neat advantage is that there’s no installer package to take up your time, which means you can run this application right after it got downloaded. As a consequence, the computer you use it on doesn’t suffer from any modifications, since registries aren’t altered. However, you need to make sure Java Runtime Environment is installed for proper functionality.

When it comes to visuals, the application keeps everything simple so you don’t feel overwhelmed or confused for that matter. A classic window design is used to show all differences, as well as options you use to load files and put the process in motion. As such, accommodation becomes a walk in the park.

Sadly, you can’t just drag files of interest over the main window so you need to rely on the separate browse dialogs, or paste the file path inside the dedicated field. Pressing Browse brings up another window with two panes, for directories and files. Once this is done on both ends, the only thing left to do now is hit the Diff button.

Scanning the files and showing results doesn’t take long. In case no differences are found, the application does nothing, so don’t worry if there’s nothing shown in the main window. In the event that files have differences, these are enlisted with different colors so you can easily tell which file it belongs to, with text also pointing out the exact spot.

Sure enough, this is a helpful feature, especially because it has to do with the healthcare system. Sadly, the application is not capable of identifying MSH-7, MSH-10, and OBR-22, representing headers and observation requests, which makes overall practicality rather questionable.

You can navigate through results by jumping to specific lines, or even using a search tool for custom queries. These options are found in the context menu. Once you’re done analyzing, you can save a list of differences as a HTML file.

All things considered, we come to the conclusion that HL7 Diff leaves a bit more to be desired overall, even though you don’t have any trouble accommodating or using it. The scale is tipped against its favor because of incomplete feature implementation, but if MSH-7, MSH-10, or OBR-22 are not the main targets, it can get the job done.