Radiology Report Repository Spike Update #1

Yesterday I started working on the spike for the Radiology Report Repository.  The first thing I did was create a sample ORU message to work with.  I decided to make the most basic and simple ORU message possible and this is what I came up with:

MSH|^~\&||ABC|||201503231355||ORM^O01|1000|D|2.4|||AL|NE
PID|1|2000^^^^MR|||DUCK^DONALD||19340609|M|||1113 QUACK STREET^^DUCKBURG^CALISOTA^^^^^|||||||
PV1|1|I||EL||||||SURG||||PHY||||IN|||||||||||||||||||||ABC||ADM|||201503231330||||||||
OBR|1||3000|RAD^CARM^RAD C-ARM|||201503233154||||||||||||||||||F|||||||||
OBX|1|TX|L.RADREA2^Reason for Exam:||Report text

The key things in this message are:

Patient Name: DUCK^DONALD
Patient MRN: 2000
Accession Number: 3000
Report Date: March 23, 2015
Report Text: Report Text
Exam Code: CARM

I also need to send this message to my HL7 listener, so I downloaded and install HL7 Inspector for this.  After installing HL7 Inspector, copy the above test ORU message above into your clipboard, then right click the background of HL7 Inspector and choose "Import from Clipboard", click OK on the "Import Options" dialog and you should see the message displayed like this:

Next I need an HL7 listener.  I initially started with Mirth Connect but quickly abandoned it as I realized I would need to write quite a bit of logic and it would be very hard to develop/debug/test that logic using Mirth.  I decided to try building the prototype using Node.js and google helped me find the following code to receive HL7 Messages.  I created a new project using WebStorm, pasted that code in there, started up the Node.js process, configured HL7 Inspector to send to port 6020 and sent the message to it from HL7 Inspector:

Success!  Next up is parsing the HL7 message and implement the following pseudo code logic:

parse the HL7 message
search for Patient resource given the MRN
if Patient resource does not exist
  create Patient resource javascript object
  POST Patient resource javascript object
Create DiagnosticReport javascript object with reference to Patient resource
POST DiagnosticReport javascript object

Given this pseudo code, the first step is to parse the HL7 message.   A google search points me to the L7 library.  A bit of code later and I have parsed the fields I need to create a Patient resource:

Next up we need to start implementing the pseudo code.