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Showing posts from February 28, 2010

Acknowledgements in HL7V2.x

HL7V2.x messaging standard indicates that Acknowledgements (ACK’s) are messages sent by a receiving system to the sending system in response to a transaction from the sending application. In a setup where HL7 is implemented the sending system will assume that the message sent by it is not received till it receives an ACK from the receiver. So in summary Acknowledgements are used to confirm the receipt of the message. Acknowledgements are implemented at two levels transport level and application level. In this post we will have a look at both the options. Transport Level Acknowledgements: Sending systems open a connection to send messages to the receiving messages, mostly through the interface engine which act as broker for communications between different systems in a healthcare setup. If a message is acknowledged on the same connection which is used to send a message they are termed as transport level acknowledgements. The connections can be transient or persistent in nature.