A method of retrieving data from a Health Level 7 (HL7) clinical data from one or more modalities for transferring to a dictation system is disclosed. The method includes receiving HL7 clinical data having one or more multi-segment fields from a modality that generates the HL7 clinical data; accessing a formatting template for use in normalizing the parsed HL7 clinical data, the formatting template including a retrieval setting that specifies a type of the one or more multi-segment fields from which to retrieve the one or more values; retrieving the values from the fields of the one or more multi-segment fields based on the retrieval setting as specified in the formatting template; normalizing the retrieved values using format settings set in the formatting template; and sending the normalized values to the dictation system for use in generating a report by the dictation system.