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ACK Protocol

An important part of the HL7 standard is the ACKnowledgment protocol. Every time an application accepts a message and consumes the data, it is expected to send an ACKnowledgment message back to the sending application. The sending application is expected to keep on sending a message until it has received an ACK message.

If you do not follow this rule then data may be lost in the transmission. If you always follow it then you will never lose HL7 data.

	Only send back an HL7 ACK message when you have consumed the data in the message. To learn about Auto ACKnowledgment messages, see Auto ACKnowledgments.