{nule.org}

It’s kind of weird to think about concrete things on our lives that we’re actually proud of. Yeah, graduating high-school with honors, or college at all are impressive; getting published, starting a family, etc. All good stuff. I’m not sure what to think of the fact that I’m starting to think of the HL7 Comm software as being one of my great accomplishments.

The thing about the Comm software is that it scratches a number of the great geek itches I’ve had for integration software. There are two huge features in 0.8 that makes it, at least for a power user like myself, pretty much the ultimate utility for HL7 integration. (I’m a user of it myself, you know, it’s not made in a vacuum, so I feel obliged to review my own software just like I’d review anybody elses.) First the manual ack/nack utility is great for fairly obvious reasons. Nothing else out there can really let the integrator create responses with the diversity that a remote system may. This may not manage to include a variety of network problems (nothing by iptables really can), but feel free to ACK/NACK or idle away, and make your responses look just as ridiculous as those we get from these systems that we connect to.

Next is something that I’m really excited about. In my own mind this fulfills the promise of two pieces of software I’ve written that haven’t been utilized by the masses out there to the extent they could be. In this release I include beanshell support within HL7 Comm. You can write your own scripts and do whatever you’d like to the data that you process. Here’s what it looks like:

You can even use beanshell to write your own interfaces to HL7 Comm:

It comes with a number of sample scripts to get you started, but the possibilities are endless (I can say without hyperbole for once). How often have you had to massage data to get it into an EMR? Here you can do intelligent bulk edits on data using something that actually understands HL7. You can run the data through it inline as a proxy or as a pre or post processor to format data as you require without additional expensive software. (Send me your sample scripts too! Other users would love to see them.)

I’m really happy with what you can do here. The only things left for 0.8 are to update the documentation and to create a non-GUI logic client for the beanshell scripts. That will let you run your scripts in a headless manner. Probably about a week until that happens, but until then, I give the 0.8 release my stamp of approval. The clients are rock solid as always, and the new functionality is icing on the cake.

Enjoy!

More cool stuff is coming for a 0.9 and a 1.0 release. Let me know what you think – this is your software too! Also I want to know if the users of this software want an official nule.org mailing list for it. Do you want to know when new versions come out? Do you want to discuss with others best practices for integration?