A language for generating HL7 reformatting programs

Describes the design of a language for automatically generating programs to reformat HL7 messages. The clinical information system (CIS) at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center (CPMC) uses HL7 as a standard for data interchange. Collecting data from several different ancillaries necessitates reformatting the information to provide a uniform data representation for the CIS. We developed a system that automatically generates HL7 reformatters given a specification of operations that need to be performed on the third-party messages. This automatic generation significantly reduces the development time; we expect it to have a major impact on the maintenance of these programs as well.