I’ve just found a very handy feature in HL7 Soup Online for sharing an HL7 message with someone else.

Right-click on any message in the list and select Copy message as link. This puts a hyperlink onto your clipboard which you can then paste into an email, support ticket or chat message.

Right-click on your message and select Copy message as Link

When the other person clicks the link, the exact message opens for them in HL7 Soup Online. They can see the readable description of the message, click through the fields, and find out what the values mean without having to install anything.

Take a look at this link to see it in action.

This is particularly useful when the person you are sending it to doesn’t work with HL7 every day. Pasting the raw message into an email normally gives them a block of text full of pipes and carets. Sending the link lets them see that it is a patient registration, which details are for the patient, what sort of visit it is, and where each value sits in the message.

I can see this being useful when asking a software vendor about a particular field, adding an example to a support ticket, or explaining a message to someone who understands the workflow but not necessarily HL7.

There is one important thing to remember. The message is included in the link, so you should treat that link in exactly the same way as you would treat the original message. Don’t copy a live message containing patient information and send it as it is.

HL7 Soup Online has an Anonymize menu at the top of the screen. If you are starting with a real message, anonymize it before creating the link. I would still have a quick look through the result afterwards to make sure that any local identifiers or unusual fields have also been dealt with. If possible, a synthetic test message is always the safest one to share.

That’s really all there is to it. Right-click the message, copy the link and send it. The recipient gets the actual message in a tool that helps them understand it, rather than having to work it out from the raw HL7 themselves.