An extensible HL7 middleware for heterogeneous healthcare information exchange

In this paper, we developed an extensible HL7 middleware to exchange the heterogeneous healthcare information. A semantic structure mapping, which can be configured dynamically, is presented to guide the data conversion of heterogeneous healthcare information. These heterogeneous data can be quickly built or parsed into standard HL7 messages for transmission. This middleware is designed and implemented based on the interface-oriented programming ideas and plug-in mechanism, which can be extended conveniently to accomplish the data exchange between new data format and the existing data format. Experimental results show that the heterogeneous healthcare information can be exchanged and integrated successfully and quickly using this HL7 middleware.