When I started building my Maternity HL7-to-FHIR Pipeline, my first instinct was to do everything in Python. Parse the HL7 message, map the fields, validate the FHIR resource, persist it, all in one FastAPI service. It was clean. It was simple. It was wrong.
Some Background
I've been building an open-source pipeline that takes HL7 v2.5 messages, the kind hospital maternity systems still send over raw TCP connections, and turns them into FHIR R4 resources with Australian Base profiles. Patient admissions, lab orders, vital signs. The sort of data that's been flowing between hospital systems in pipe-delimited text since the 1990s, now mapped into modern healthcare APIs.
If you're curious about the full project, I wrote a detailed walkthrough in Bridging Legacy Hospital Messages to Modern Healthcare APIs. That article covers the end-to-end architecture, but here's the short version:
Hospital Maternity System
