Here we go with the low rent screenshot edition of the screencast.

Again, here is the scenario:

We want to take an HL7 feed and extract some values from the message segments and populate a database.

To do this we need to build a channel.

Channel you say?

Yep, a channel.

A Mirth channel to me is a task. I wanna get this from here, and send it to there talking HL7 stuff…

Our channel has some different parts depending on what kind it is, but typically they have a channel with at the minimum a source and a destination. With a transformer or filter to do some ‘disco moves’ in between. (note: the use of the term disco automatically qualifies me as a dork, but you did take the low-rent route didn’t you?)

Source- Where is the stuff coming from?

In our case, an HL7 inbound listener:

Destination- Where is the stuff going?

In our case, a Postgres Database.

Transformer- Perform Disco Moves on HL7 Message data.

In our case, map segment PID 5.1 to variable ‘lastname’ and segment PID 5.2 to variable ‘firstname’.

Result- Our new patient in Rails!

If its too vague, check out the Mirth Screencast

(tip: Its “Low Rent” too!)

Actors:

Ron Sweeney
My MacBook – Random Shutdown Edition
iShowU
Mirth
HL7Browser
Ruby on Rails