I came to this thread late, quickly perused the comments so may have missed a point. Michael, what are you intending to do with the lab data, once parsed and stored in a database?
I have a similar situation, receiving HL7 from the hospital. Mostly from frustration with having to have someone sit there to answer non-matching demographic questions (to which the AC interface has no memory), I now parse, filter, and alter demographics so that only my patient with the correct AC name (e.g. Bob instead of Robert) are on the list before AC import. A side effect is that I now have a database of lab values and dates. I chose Access for processing, since I use Access at the front end as well. As Roger puts it, it works fine for us "semi-literate techies". I have used MySQL in the past, but find Access to be adequate for communication between its databases and tables.
