ruby-hl7 0.2.44 released

Mon, Aug 6, 2007 dev

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This is the second release of my Ruby HL7 library. HL7 is a standard for information exchange in hospitals, it’s used for everything from lab work to billing and scheduling. The library can parse or generate HL7 messages. Currently the library only support HL7 2.x, but I’d like to add support for the xml based HL7 3.0 in a future version.

You can install the library by typing gem install ruby-hl7. The bugtracker is hosted locally. There is a rubyforge project to store the releases.

This release is mainly a bug-fix release, here’s the list of changes:

• Various segment access related bugs handled (null segments, empty segments)
• Speed fix when parsing messages where there are a large number of unimplemented segments
• Associated/Child segment access

Here’s an example of the new child segment access api:

require 'rubygems'
require 'ruby-hl7'

msg = HL7::Message.new "my_msg.hl7"

#this will go through each observation and print the observed values
msg["OBR"].each |obr|
  obr.children.each do |obx|
    puts obx.observation_value
  end
end

My thanks to Jeff for bringing the performance issue to my attention. I’m always happy to get feedback, patches and thanks. Cheers!