HL7 Soup

HL7 Soup version 2.3 has heaps of new features, but as you can see, we’ve managed to keep that great, simple user experience, that we get so much positive feedback about.

So let’s start with the basics inside the HL7 Editor.

If you select some text, any other fields with exactly the same values will be highlighted. Great when you are changing values, and hadn’t realised you need to change more than one location.

How about where you need to update a field on every message, let’s change all the sample messages to 2.3. Simply change one, then update all the messages.

We’ve stepped up our searching abilities too with “Filters”. Add a filter and messages that don’t meet your criteria are instantly hidden from the list. Searching on date fields even give date specific options like greater or less than. In other words it is not just text comparison, they are actually treated as dates. The editor also highlights your filtered field so it is easy to spot while the filter is in place.

What I think make filters so fantastic however, is that the update fields feature I mentioned earlier only updates the filtered messages. You could for instance filter all the ADT A04 messages, and then update them to A05’s, leaving the others untouched. You can even send all filtered messages to another tab, and save them as a new message set.

Then we have highlighting, validation and messages comparisons. In fact it is such a big feature that we have create a whole tutorial video for it called Highlighting, validation and comparing messages! You can watch that by clicking here.

Simply put, you can create highlighters that always show a field in a certain colour. This highlighting can also be dependant on criteria, and can even be said to make your message “invalid”.

Filters then can return you only the valid or invalid messages. Highlighted message will tell you why they are highlighted if you look, but “invalid” message make it very clear. They change to red and the message interpretation lists all errors, telling you what’s wrong.

You can even create different highlighting and validation sets. These can be used for different message types or integrations, and then export these to share your suppliers or customers and they can check their messages too.

Automatic generation makes it easy to make a highlighting and validation sets based on an existing message, and out of the box, all common date fields are validated to make sure there are no mistakes in your messages.

Comparing message, has a tonne of flexibility to. Comparing by values, messages structure, or even compare to find the missing fields between messages.

How about importing your own HL7 schema and have that validated, better than that, how about importing someone else’s. Download them from your supplier, or your countries HL7 org, and HL7 Soup can describe and validate the HL7 message that you need. We even did a tutorial video on using the interoperability toolkit, the ITK, which is used in the UK’s NHS. You can get to that from here. Even if you aren’t in the United Kingdom it explains how you can import schemas into HL7 Soup. But if you are in the UK and use HL7 you should defiantly look at this.

You can now swap out the message type description for each of your messages with the patient’s name. See how each message now states the name of the patient.

Zooming via Ctrl and the mouse wheel is now supported for both the HL7 editor, as well as the interpretations window. Note how zooming right out even collapses the lines so you can view as much as possible.

We also added some nice features for when you are creating HL7 messages.

HL7 Soup provides you with automatic message generation by messages type, or you can simply click here to add a new segment.

One of my absolute favourites is expanding and collapsing fields, components and segments. It is intelligent too as it only adds what your current schema or version of HL7 defines. Look for the quick keys here to make it super-convenient.

Sometime you get messages that simply don’t have the right segment separators. Microsoft Word in my experience seems often to be to the culprit for this, reformatting my messages. HL7 Soup now understands these, and even fixes the messages for you so you can send it on.

Finally, we’ve also added a notifications page at start up that tells you when new versions of HL7 Soup are out and what they can do for you. Mark the messages as read and they won’t show again, or you can even click here and even new messages won’t show at start-up. You can always get to them from the main menu.

We hope you like the new features, and accompanying tutorials. Feel free to leave some comments, or feedback about what you’d like in the future version.