HL7Spy is the fastest, most full-featured HL7 tool on the market. With the Custom Code feature you can write validation functions, and transforms, and more in c# (vb coming soon!).

If you really want to get a taste for it, we recommend grabbing the free download and taking it for a test drive. However, if you just want an idea of what it can do, here is a sampling of some of the major features:

Load - quickly load files, from 1KB to 100MB and more. HL7Spy will autodetect most file types, and allow you to specify the format of particularly unusual files.

View - see messages in an easy-to-read layout, with field names and values decoded according to the HL7 standard. There are also many additional features, such as normalizing escape characters better readability, highlighting fields by name, and viewing only relevant fields for each message.

Edit - Edit message directly, or use the Segment Editor to deal with field locations and escape characters automatically.

Search - build complex queries against whole messages or particular fields.

Sort - sort large message collections based on the fields important to you.

Analyze - generate statistics showing the unique values in each field, and quickly drill down to the messages with interesting contents.

Validation ? use c# (vb coming soon) to write sophisticated validation routines, well beyond the simple table validation available in other tools. For example, validate the proper exam states transitions, or verify patient names are not modified during an ORM, or ORU update. Anything is possible!

Transformations ? modify messages using HL7 defined classes. For example, pid.PatientName_05.First=?SMITH^JOHN^D?, sets the first patient name of the message to John Smith.

Report - generate, save and print reports on large groups of messages

Send and Receive - send and receive messages over the network using MLLP. This includes the ability to view ACKs and/or NACKs