>We here at State University of NY, Downstate Medical Center are using and implementing HL7 standard for about 3 years and exchanging different kind of
>messages between ADT, Lab, Pharmacy, Radiology and other systems using an
>interface engine (CERNER Open Engine) as the communication hub handling both LU6.2 ansd TCP/IP comm. protocols. We also wrote a few custom VB and VFP programs to handle HL7. VB program uses Winsock activex control to habdle network protocol and VFP handles parsing and updating of the HL7 messages.
>
Kam

You can use our FoxSock(VB wrapper of Winsock, which avoid some problems of implementing a WinSock in VFP) Control and all your communication to be done directly in VFP. In that way apps will be more faster and stable. All other could be done with VFP.