My small company provides hospitals with a bug prevalence report. Earlier, we had only 1 customer who provides the necessary data for the application (patient demographics, culture details, antibiotic dosage etc) in a CSV dump for us to ingest. Now, we have larger hospitals interested in our product who have HL7 V2.5. I've found that people use Mirth connect for interfacing but very little on how this entire setup works. As a vendor, what are the things I need to do to make the integration possible?
From what I've read one of the approaches is the following:
Also, what is the standard followed when hospitals send HL7 messages? Do the hospital systems provide a consolidated HL7 file for the required data? Or will I as the vendor have to collect separate files and parse them to convert data into usable format?
The usual process for receiving HL7 data is to:
There are alternatives such as HL7v2 over web services or via SFTP, but these aren't as common. HL7v2 messages aren't files, unless you are using the SFTP process to actually download/upload messages. Each HL7v2 message represents a single event and are almost always transmitted individually in near-real-time.