HL7 Communication Environment (HLCE)

Abstract

Interoperability among heterogeneous healthcare applications is difficult due to not following standard message communication specification to exchange clinical and administrative data. Health Level Seven (HL7) is the leading standard playing active role to make healthcare applications interoperable. Focus of this project is to develop communication environment for HL7 v3 message communication. The project is entitled as “HL7 Communication Environment (HLCE)”. HL7 V3 implementation requires development of various components namely message manipulation (parsing/generation), database mapping component, and transportation component. Objective of HLCE is interaction with transportation component of HL7. It provides a reliable and robust communication environment for the transportation of HL7 V3 messages. HL7 specifications provides three ways of communication e.g. MLLP, Web Services and ebXML. HLCE is using web services and Minimal Lower Layer Protocol (MLLP) as transportation mechanisms for HL7 messages. To bring in the feature of robustness and reliability, Java Messaging Service (JMS) is used in the system architecture. JMS is a Sun Microsystems’ specification for supporting loosely coupled communication among applications. It enables a synchronous communication among applications in a reliable manner. Message is guaranteed to be delivered at most once by the JMS specifications. HLCE incorporates the advantages of web services and HL7 standards. Web service brings the notion of platform and language independence for the sake of implementation while HL7 V3 brings solution for global healthcare interoperability.