A Middleware to Support HL7 Standards for the Integration between Healthcare Applications

In this paper, we implemented a scalable plug-in middleware to process different HL7 versions (Version 2, Version 3, FHIR). The middleware solves incompliance, prevents security breaches, and increases the message transfer reliability. The middleware consists of four components, each having certain logic. Some of these components are optional, in that, the HL7 message is not required to pass through them. Once the HL7 message is received, the middleware applies the reliability and validation logic. It then passes the message to the rest of the components that may modify the content of the message, once successfully updated only then will it be delivered to the intended destination. The experiments show that the middleware can exchange different HL7 message versions efficiently, accomplishing conversion and increasing levels of privacy quickly.