HL7Spy is a productivity enhancement tool for individuals working with  HL7 2.x messages.

HL7Spy was developed for a group of HL7 Analysts working for a large provider of Radiology Information Systems (RIS). Their job was to integrate the company's Radiology Work-flow product with the hospital's IT infrastructure.

If you are familiar with HL7 and have had the opportunity to analyze HL7 messages coming from different HL7 systems providers, this can be a very non-trivial task. Site-specific variations, fields formatted incorrectly, field lengths not adhered to, missing required fields, or fields put in the wrong location, misinterpretations of the standard, misuse of transaction types, and short-cuts taken by vendors, are the norm, not the exception.

As an analyst, faced with the variability of HL7 and the often incomplete, or inaccurate message definition provided by the customer, the job of interconnecting two systems is a daunting task indeed.

This is where HL7Spy comes in. HL7Spy has been designed to help HL7 analysts and programmers quickly interpret, and characterize very large HL7 message streams. It quickly reads in thousands of messages and provides detailed statistics at the message, field, component, and sub-component levels. This information provides great insight into the nature of the message exchange and takes the guesswork out of know which fields are filled in when, and with what values.

HL7Spy also includes features for viewing, editing, search, sorting, sending and receiving HL7, retrieving messages from databases, viewing messages in hexadecimal format, and a host of other features that make HL7Spy an invaluable tool for on-going maintenance and troubleshooting of HL7 interfaces.