Customizing HL7 V2.4 ADT Messages with BizTalk BTAHL7 accelerator?

Question

I am very new to dealing with HL7 and my company recently began a very large project in which we will be receiving various ADT messages in the HL7 v2.4 specification. We already use BizTalk extensively here and the plan was to leverage the BTAHL7 accelerator for BizTalk 2010 to accept these messages.

My issue is this, the ADT messages we are receiving from our trading partner do not match the HL7 v2.4 specifications for pretty much all of the messages we are receiving (Even though the MSH segment is for V2.4 and they've told us that is the version they will be sending files in).

For instance they are sending us A04 messages and in the PV1-3 field the spec calls for 9 subcomponents (separated by the standard ^ delimiter). What they are sending in that field is 11 subcomponents.

Example: F1^F2^F3^F4^F5^F6^F7^F8^F9^F10^F11 instead of this (which would match the spec): F1^F2^F3^F4^F5^F6^F7^F8^F9

This also happens for the PV1-42 field.

After scouring the internet I can't find any help for dealing with this kind of situation in BizTalk using the accelerator. It seems to me that people can customize the data within the message and that happens often (for instance sending strings where the spec calls for an int) but cannot change the actual layout (the situation I have listed above) when dealing with HL7 and BizTalk. These messages fail even when I don't set up BizTalk to validate body segments or custom data types (which makes sense to me and is to be expected because they aren't sending strange data that still conforms to the layout of the specs, but rather an entirely different layout).

My question is this. Is there a way to deal with this utilizing the accelerator functionality without having to write custom code to "fix" the files before sending them to the accelerator pipelines? According to our trading partner this is just the way their product (Cloverleaf) sends the data and that they are already working with various other trading partners with this format.

Answer 1

Yes. Unless the Trading Partner is doing something that does not follow HL7 convention, you can handle such customization by modifying the HL7 message schema to accomodate the differences.

In this case, just add two additional child elements to the PV1 to accept the new data.

You will also have to change the TargetNamespace of the modified schema to isolate it to this Trading partner and set that on...one of the tabs (sorry don't recall exactly) in HL7 Configuration.