Mirth is shaping up as an ‘Open Source HL7 Integration Engine’. After recently downloading the product I was extremely pleased to successfully read an HL7 message from disk, manipulate it and send the output XML to a file. I then repeated the process inserting selected fields into a database table.

Mirth is located at http://www.mirthproject.org and the tutorial which stepped me through the above exercise is here: http://www.mirthproject.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=45&Itemid=81

The only action that was not completely intuitive was to manipulate HL7 messages. After reading the example above I found it is simple, paste an existing HL7 messages into the ‘message template’ and then the HL7 tree is populated, now just drag and drop the fields.

Mirth compares well to other engines, though it still has a way to catch up with Rhapsody from Orion Health. Still, I hope they keep up the good work and I look forward to doing some heavy performance testing in the future.