HL7 Comm

HL7Comm was developed to be a robust HL7 communications client that can perform network communication, translation, file actions, logic and much more on HL7 messages and other types of data. Much more information on what it can do is available in the documentation that comes with the program. You can try it simply by using the webstart links above and click the help icon for more information.

The most common usages for HL7 Comm are probably to send data from a file into a TCP/IP MLLP server, or to listen on a port and receive data to save in a file. Many more possiblities exist and the sample configuration templates list all the common uses plus some more advanced features.

First, it's good to know the four types of components that are plugged into a running HL7 Comm. These are basically of three general types, but two are similar enough that components can be shared. The three component types are inbound clients, outbound clients and logic agents.

Each running HL7 Comm must have at least one inbound client configured, and one logic agent. It may also have one or more outbound clients configured for data and a special outbound client for handling log messages. Any of the outbound clients can be used for logging, however just about everybody will want log messages to be written to a file as opposed to over a network socket.