Tutorial Context

In a typical real-world situation, you have an application with access to patient information that is periodically updated (for instance, when a patient is discharged or a lab result is issued). On the other hand, you have parties who are interested in knowing when that information changes. The parties with whom you want to communicate, however, have no direct access to the data, especially to the manner in which the application internally structures the data. Instead, it is likely that other parties have their own customized methods of handling data internally. To communicate the data to them, you need to encode it in an HL7 message, which is a widely used standard for transmitting healthcare-related information. As long as the parties can handle HL7 messages, you can communicate your data to them.

For the purposes of this tutorial, the structure of the data inside your application bears little relation to the format of the data specified by the HL7 standard. What is needed is an interface between the application and the HL7 message, a way to efficiently and reliably map the desired information out of the application's data structures and into an HL7 message, which can then be sent to interested parties. The Java CAPS provides a flexible and intuitive means of designing HL7 messages and mapping the desired data into the messages, thus making the data available to the recipient in a standard format.