Developer Builds HL7-to-FHIR Maternity Pipeline to Bridge Legacy Hospital Systems

A software developer built a working pipeline to convert HL7 v2 maternity messages into AU-profiled FHIR R4 resources, motivated by recurring requirements seen in Australian remote FHIR engineer job listings. Australian hospitals still rely on HL7 v2 for patient admissions, lab results, and orders transmitted via MLLP, while the Australian Digital Health Agency is actively pushing adoption of FHIR R4 through initiatives like the Sparked FHIR Accelerator and AU Core Framework. An initial single-script approach quickly revealed critical gaps, including no MLLP handling, brittle parsing, missing FHIR validation, and no cross-resource linking between Patients, Encounters, Observations, and Conditions. The developer then redesigned the system as a multi-stage pipeline, separating concerns such as message reception, parsing, mapping, validation, and persistence, each with independent error handling. The project, published on GitHub, also incorporates Mirth Connect to handle MLLP reception and HL7 parsing rather than rebuilding those capabilities from scratch in Python.