Qliva receives structured pathology results and clinical correspondence from Australian labs and radiology providers via HL7 v2 messaging.
What is HL7?
HL7 (Health Level 7) is a messaging standard used by Australian pathology labs, radiology providers, and hospitals to send test results and clinical documents electronically. When a lab processes a blood test, they send an HL7 message to your clinic system — and Qliva can receive and display those results automatically.
What Qliva supports
Qliva supports HL7 v2.x messages delivered via the Medical Objects / Capricorn routing network — the most widely used clinical messaging infrastructure in Australia.
What arrives via HL7
| Content type | How it arrives | Where it appears in Qliva |
|---|---|---|
| Structured pathology results | OBX segments with coded values | Pathology Inbox |
| Clinical correspondence / letters | FT (formatted text) OBX segments | Clinical Mail Inbox |
| PDF reports | ED (encapsulated data) segments | Attached in pathology or clinical mail |
Most labs send a mix of these — for example, a blood panel might include both structured OBX values and a PDF summary.
Connecting your clinic
Step 1 — Register with Medical Objects
If your clinic isn't already registered, sign up at medicalobjects.com.au as a healthcare provider. Medical Objects is the network that routes HL7 messages between labs and clinic software.
Step 2 — Qliva configures your Medical Objects site mapping
Unlike most integrations, HL7 connection setup is support-mediated, not self-service. There is no settings page where a clinic connects its own Medical Objects account. Instead, contact Qliva support with your clinic's Medical Objects details — Qliva staff will register your clinic's Medical Objects site GUID against your tenant in our routing configuration.
Step 3 — Configure routing with Medical Objects
Once Qliva has your site mapped, we'll confirm the destination details with Medical Objects on our side so that messages addressed to your clinic are routed correctly.
Step 4 — Test with a known result
Ask the lab to send a known test result. It should appear in your Pathology Inbox (or Clinical Mail Inbox, depending on message type) within a few minutes. If it doesn't arrive, contact Qliva support with the message timestamp so we can check the endpoint logs.
Your HL7 endpoint
HL7 messages are not received per-tenant subdomain. All Medical Objects traffic is sent to a single, shared external endpoint:
POST https://hl7.qliva.com.au/hl7/
In production this currently runs on a dedicated EC2 host, not on the main Vercel application.
Authentication and tenant resolution work differently from a typical per-clinic API key:
- The endpoint validates the sending client via mTLS client-certificate CN validation, read from the
x-ssl-client-s-dnheader — not a bearer token or shared secret you configure yourself. - Tenant identity comes from the message content, not the URL: Qliva looks up the GUID in the message's MSH-6 field against a
medical_objects_sitestable to determine which clinic the message belongs to.
Internally, this external receiver hands the message off to a separate, internal-only endpoint (/api/hl7/process) for async processing, authenticated server-to-server with a global INTERNAL_API_SECRET via an x-internal-secret header. That internal route is never exposed externally and is not something a clinic or integrator ever calls directly.
Because tenant identity comes from the Medical Objects site GUID mapping rather than a URL or key you manage, HL7 connection setup is entirely handled by Qliva support — contact us to get your clinic's Medical Objects site configured.
Message routing logic
Qliva routes each OBR group in an incoming HL7 message independently, so a single message can produce both pathology and clinical mail rows. The primary routing mechanism is the OBR-24 (Diagnostic Service Section ID) code:
| OBR-24 code | Routed to |
|---|---|
PHY, RAD, OSL, OT | Clinical Mail Inbox |
CH, HM, MB, SR, GEN, IMM, TOX, URN | Pathology Inbox |
If OBR-24 is absent or doesn't match a known code, Qliva falls back to inspecting the OBX value types in that group: a group is routed to Clinical Mail only if every non-PDF (non-ED) result in it is free text (FT/TX). Any structured or coded value (NM, CE, ST, and so on) sends it to the Pathology Inbox instead.
Functional reference ranges
Australian labs include their own reference ranges in HL7 results. Qliva displays these, but your admin can also configure functional (optimal) reference ranges for any test panel — separate from the lab-issued values. This is useful for longevity and integrative medicine practices that interpret results differently from conventional medicine.
To configure functional ranges: Admin Portal → Settings → Pathology Panels
There is no per-clinic HL7 secret for you to manage or share — authentication happens via mTLS certificates and Medical Objects site GUID mapping, both controlled by Qliva and Medical Objects. If you're ever asked to share HL7 credentials outside of Qliva support or Medical Objects directly, treat that as suspicious.