HL7 v2

HL7 version 2 is a message format dating from the late 1980s and still the workhorse of hospital integration. Messages are pipe-delimited segments — an ORU message carries observation results, ORM an order — and it is what most laboratory analysers speak when they report a result to a laboratory system, typically over a socket using MLLP framing or by writing files to a watched folder.

Why it matters in a hospital

Analyser integration is the difference between a technician reading a number off a screen and retyping it, and that number arriving attached to the right specimen with its provenance intact. Retyping is where transcription errors enter a clinical record, and it is slow at exactly the moment a laboratory is busiest. HL7 v2 is old and famously inconsistent between vendors — every instrument dialect differs a little — but it is what the installed base speaks, and a system that cannot parse it cannot talk to the machines a hospital already owns.

How Trisvio handles it

Trisvio parses HL7 v2 with its own dependency-free parser and accepts analyser messages over MLLP or file-drop through an on-premise gateway, because analysers sit on the hospital LAN and the platform does not. Parsing is pure and fixture-tested, which means a new instrument can be supported from a captured message without the instrument being present.