Welcome to Chameleon, an intuitive and easy-to-use software tool for adding industry-standard message capabilities to new or existing healthcare applications. This product is designed with the specific needs of healthcare application developers in mind. It provides expert guidance for developing applications to help companies focus their time on business logic, rather than complex protocol details from application code.

	Many of our customers are now using Iguana instead of Chameleon. See Why Choose Iguana Over Chameleon? for reasons why you should consider using Iguana instead of Chameleon to implement your HL7 interface.

Chameleon includes numerous features that make it easy to design your HL7 project from start to finish. This manual shows you how to get the most out of these features. The predefined hierarchy (message, message grammar, identity, etc.) immediately gives structure to your HL7 project. The built-in libraries of messages, segments and tables allow you to quickly set up a project, instead of recreating project components from scratch. It also includes many user-friendly and timesaving features that allow you to easily handle all the different flavors of HL7 you need to support. In short, Chameleon stands out from other HL7 messaging toolkits because it is truly a complete HL7 solution with numerous customizable features.

	If you are using Iguana, you will need to use Chameleon to create your VMD file. For more details, see Why do Iguana Users Need Chameleon?

In this section of the manual, you will learn how to get started with Chameleon to begin creating your own custom HL7 message definition file.