HL7 v2 message viewer

What HL7 v2 is and how to use the viewer

HL7 v2 is the HL7 International messaging standard that has been used for decades to exchange data between healthcare systems, such as electronic health records, laboratory, admission and billing systems. Each message is made of segments, one per line, identified by three characters: MSH (message header), PID (patient identification), PV1 (patient visit), ORC and OBR (orders), OBX (observations and results), among others.

Within a segment, fields are separated by a delimiter, usually |, and may contain repetitions (~), components (^) and subcomponents (&). These delimiters are declared in the header itself, in MSH-1 and MSH-2, and special characters inside values are encoded with escape sequences such as \F\ and \S\. The message type is in MSH-9 (for example, ADT^A01 or ORU^R01) and the version of the standard is in MSH-12.

How to use: paste the message into the box and click Analyze. The viewer reads the delimiters from MSH, splits segments, fields, repetitions, components and subcomponents, resolves the escapes and shows each value with its path (such as PID-5.1) and the official field name from the dictionary of the version in MSH-12: 2.3.1, 2.4 or 2.5; for other versions it uses the 2.5 names and tells you so. Structural issues are listed with the segment line. The message is processed in your browser: it is not sent to any server or stored.