HL7 Browser For Linux

HL7 Browser is a tool that allows health care professionals to simplify the analysis and editing of HL7 records. Current features let you browser HL7 records, edit them and produce reports on them. You can also send them via TCP/IP (using the MLLP protocol) or receive them and save them to disk. It has many of the same features as some commercial programs, but because it's Java it runs everywhere.

The HL7Browser was a utility that I wrote a few years ago in Perl to help me work with HL7 formatted data. If you've ever worked with it you know that it's nearly impossible to read through and pick out fields accurately. So the HL7Browser reads in HL7 data, and splits it into a heirarchical view of the data with records listed at the top level, segments below records, fields below segments and so on. This ends up being a fairly natural way of looking at this data and as tools like the ability to search within the data were added it became ever more useful.

Unfortunately, the orginal HL7Browser was my first stab at writing GUI code (it was in Perl/Tk) and one of my first tries at writing a more complex program. As a result it didn't work terribly well in all situations and was more than a little difficult to update and fix bugs in. People were still using the application, so I hated to just throw away the code, but at the same time I hated to let people use it with all the bugs and other cruft in the code.

In the meantime at my workplace more and more of the development we are doing is in Java. Despite some initial thorns and the fact that Java sometimes makes the easy tasks really hard, it's a language that I've come to like. That and the desire to tackle a larger, more complex problem, like a stand-alone application, led me to the creation of this software.