I understand your perspective on this and it is a good comment. Back in the old days it was a RS-232 cable and a “ack/nack” listener job. For the purposes of clinical interoperability, I tend to lump the transport into the physical bucket. This is because I am an applications guy… I agree that a well designed web service provides the security, dependability and monitoring capabilities that should be the norm in our industry.

Thanks for the comment

For the reader that may not be familiar with MLLP, it stands for Minimal Lower Layer Message Transport protocol and is sometimes referred to as MLP. This is a HL7 specification describing what should be minimally done to encapsulate an HL7 message. There is a decent link on it here http://www.hl7.org/Library/Committees/inm/mllp_transport_specification.PDF .