[nradov]

I'm not sure what you mean by "readable line breaks". Segment terminators for HL7 V2.x messages are clearly defined in the standard and done the same way by all major vendors. The standard is also quite clear about how to represent visual line breaks inside formatted text reports.

HL7 V2.x messaging is a bit of a monstrosity since the most common ER7 encoding is based loosely on old EDI standards. There is also a standardized XML encoding for V2.x messages which is a little easier to parse, although it's poorly supported in the industry and the schema doesn't really follow XML best practices.

The HL7 standards body has developed many other standards including V3 and FHIR (which is effectively "V4", it just didn't get a new version number in the same series). Most vendors and provider organizations are now moving toward FHIR since it's based on modern open Internet standards and somewhat easier to implement.

[lostlogin]

Not the down voter but having recently battled different line break methods, I disagree about universal vendor support. My use case has been entirely limited to radiology - a very small subset.