Table of Contents

This page is a resource to pull together some of the community contributions and other resources which can help you to deliver effective HL7 based solutions using BizTalk Server.

HL7 Overview

If you are new to HL7 and want to know more about the basics and background to HL7 check out some of these links:

This is a very short video from interfaceware about the role of HL7 in healthcare and hospitals.
This is a very short video from interfaceware which shows you the internals of an HL7 message.

To find out more about the HL7 standard in general use the HL7.org website.

Getting Started

The resources in this section will help to give you a gentle introduction to what BizTalk offers in the HL7 space.

This link covers the key features in the BizTalk HL7 adapter and what they add to BizTalk to solve HL7 integration problems.
This is a walk through of the BizTalk 2013 HL7 Accelerator.  I dont think there is a great deal of difference in the install across versions if I remember correctly.
This will show you how to create a project and add schemas etc
As the title says, but this will introduce you to the MLLP adapter.
A quick look at the tool for configuring HL7 parties
  • Nino's Blog. Nino Crudele did an excellent set of articles covering some of the essential knowledge you need for BizTalk's HL7 implementation.

Recommended Samples

When your getting started with BizTalk & HL7 there are a few resources which will give you a good understanding of the capabilities of BizTalk in this area.

There are 4 really good tutorials in the main BizTalk documentation which can help you really get into some of the features of HL7 for BizTalk.  These should definitely be one of your first points of call.
This is a walk through of some of the features within the accelerator.  Its probably not as time consuming to go through this article as the full samples in the Microsoft documentation so this article will probably help you to get up and running and do your first HL7 process a bit quicker.
This is a really nice walk through by Tomasso Groenendijk about this scenario and its nice to see the HL7 features being linked up with the ESB Toolkit.

This is an open source project and video by Michael Stephenson showing how you can use behaviour driven development techniques and automated testing to simulate your HL7/MLLP interfaces.

Deeper Dive

There are some other articles around which are a bit heavier going but can give you some good information as you get more familiar with BizTalk & HL7.

It says "getting started" but this doc is actually quite full on but provides info about HL7 v3 usage.
Its aimed at an older version of BizTalk but is very detailed and most of the info is still applicable.

Article discussing solutions where your concurrently using multiple versions of BizTalk HL7 messages.

Other Resources

Below are some other resources which you may also find useful.

  • Interview questions on HL7
       BizTalk Developer Interview Questions and Answers - HL7       
  • Linked In Groups to connect with others working on BizTalk & HL7

Tools

This section will help you identify some of the tools which can help you with HL7 integration projects involving BizTalk.

Real World & Case Studies

Below are some links to case studies which might help you understand what others have done with BizTalk & HL7

See Also

Another important place to find a huge amount of BizTalk related articles is the TechNet Wiki itself. The best entry point is BizTalk Server Resources on the TechNet Wiki.