Introducing Funke: Native HL7v2 Parsing on Databricks
Databricks, Thursday, October 8th, 2026
Databricks open-sources Funke, which parses HL7v2 health messages into native Spark types while keeping their full hierarchy.
Funke is a new open-source library that parses HL7v2 electronic health record messages into native Spark types on the Databricks lakehouse while preserving the full segment, field, component and subcomponent hierarchy.
It succeeds Smolder, Databricks' 2021 Scala library, and is rebuilt in Python and PySpark around Unity Catalog, Declarative Automation Bundles and Spark Declarative Pipelines.
The post explains why HL7v2's nested, delimiter-encoded format is hard to handle and why FHIR conversion or third-party flattening can lose detail, and Funke ships with a runnable end-to-end ingestion demo.