Gateway

Application Architecture

A Gateway is an HL7-artefacts aware application which executes business rules, and forwards/ copies/ amends/ transforms interactions (messages or batched messages) based on those business rules. From the Sender's point of view, the Gateway is considered as the consumer of the HL7 message produced and sent by the original Sender. Consequently, Gateway is always the HL7 application that is listed as the Receiver of the incoming interactions and Sender of the outgoing interactions (just like any other HL7 Application). What happens with the message once it has been consumed by the Gateway depends on the business rules.

Notes

• Question (Phoenix Action Item, refering to ATS Line item 52) - Are the Gateways always trusted? Is there a use case or a possibility of a highly distributed environment where Gateways are *not* trusted?
  • (Miroslav) This is out of the scope of the ATS and is listed in the Known Issues section of the ATS R1 C2 ballot edition. Personally, I see Gateways the same way like any other HL7 applications, where security and trust issues depend on the business level contracts, network and application configuration, security provisioning etc. We do not (nor we should) elaborate this on the level of HL7v3 normative specs.
• Question - what is the difference between a "Gateway" and a "Registry"? Charliemccay 05:17, 10 Aug 2006 (CDT)
  • See Registry. Under some circumstances a Registry could possible deemed to be a Gateway, it depends on the functionality that is performed by the registry. Gateway is meant to be a middleware role.
• Question - if I have an Intermediary that is responsible to transform HL7vx messages to HL7vy, is that a Gateway or not?
  • Answer - no. If an Intermediary provides the fucntionality of tranforming a message from one flavour of the HL7 standard to another, without any change to semantic meaning to the message, it is a Bridge and not a Gateway

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