Code Clinic - HL7 Lab - Book 9: The HL7 Message Parser (Capstone)

Everything in this track has been building to this program. You start with a complete HL7 message on the page, a header line, a patient segment and several lab results, and you take it apart properly: first the anatomy, so you know what each line is for, then a split on the line breaks that turns the message into a list of segments. From there you route by segment type, reading the three-letter name at the front of each line and sending it to the code that knows how to handle it. The patient segment is parsed into a record with labelled fields. The lab results are collected into a dictionary, one entry per test, so the whole set of results lives under the patient instead of scattered across loose variables. Then you add judgement: compare each result against its range and flag the high ones. The last chapter reads the finished record back out as a clean summary a person could actually use. Splitting, safe indexing, slicing, loops, nested splits and dictionaries all appear in one working program.

Eighteen A4 pages, in full color. Written in short sentences and plain English, for readers whose first language is not English and clearer for everyone else because of it.

Every code example in this book was run before the page was printed, so the output you read is the output you get. Instant PDF download. By M.R. Sterling.