Client is sending over PDFs on a Channel that expects only HL7

[JohnWA]

I am having an error in one of my Mirth Channels where a clinic is sending over PDFs that are oddly encoded (Photo enclosed). This channel only expects/process HL7 message. The clinic says they can't stop the messages. So I have a few questions:

1) How would I filter out these messages?

2) What format is mirth presenting the PDF in and is there a way to convert them? (I can't show the rest of the code due to HIPAA reasons but it is a lot of red question marks in diamonds and random letters/characters.

Thanks in advance.

[agermano]

That's what a PDF looks like if you open it in a text editor.

What is the source connector of your channel? A File Reader?

[JohnWA]

The source is TCP Listener. I also though just copying the pdf files from mirth and save as *.pdf would work, but it didn't. They might be just blank/corrupt though.

[agermano]

I'm a little baffled how they can't stop PDFs from flowing over a TCP connection meant for HL7.

If you just want to discard them, you can enable batch processing on your source connector, then use a javascript batch splitter script to drop them as if they were never sent. Something like this should work for your batch script.

// read entire message into string
var message = org.apache.commons.io.IOUtils.toString(reader);
// only keep it if it starts with MSH
return message.startsWith('MSH') ? message : null;

If you want to keep them it's more complicated, so I won't get into that unless you are interested.

[JohnWA]

Originally Posted by agermano

I'm a little baffled how they can't stop PDFs from flowing over a TCP connection meant for HL7.

If you just want to discard them, you can enable batch processing on your source connector, then use a javascript batch splitter script to drop them as if they were never sent. Something like this should work for your batch script.

// read entire message into string
var message = org.apache.commons.io.IOUtils.toString(reader);
// only keep it if it starts with MSH
return message.startsWith('MSH') ? message : null;

If you want to keep them it's more complicated, so I won't get into that unless you are interested.

Thanks I appreciate it. Also that is mid-size hospitals for you. The might not know how to stop it on their end.