HL7 International


Health Level Seven 'International Inc.' is a standards organization that develops technical standards for health data exchange. The HL7 series of standards are its most well known, of which the 2.x are the most commonly used in the healthcare sector. It is accredited by ANSI.

History

The HL7 community is organized in the form of a global organization and country-specific affiliate organizations. Health Level Seven International, Inc. is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan. HL7 affiliate organizations, not-for-profit organizations incorporated in local jurisdictions, exist in over 30 countries. The first affiliate organization was created in Germany in 1993.
HL7 was founded in 1987 to produce a standard for the exchange of data with hospital information systems. Donald W. Simborg, the CEO of Simborg Systems took the initiative to create the HL7 organization with the aim to allow for wider use of its own exchange protocol. Membership initially consisted of those that had already implemented the StatLAN protocol. The name "Health Level-7" is a reference to the seventh layer of the ISO OSI Reference model also known as the application layer. The name indicates that HL7 focuses on application layer protocols for the health care domain, independent of lower layers. HL7 effectively considers all lower layers merely as tools.
HL7 is one of several American National Standards Institute accredited Standards Developing Organizations operating in the healthcare arena. Most of these SDOs produce standards for a particular healthcare domain such as pharmacy, medical devices, imaging or insurance transactions. Health Level Seven's domain is clinical and administrative data.
HL7 has been adopted by ISO. The first mutually published standard is ISO/HL7 21731:2006 Health informatics—HL7 version 3—Reference information model—Release 1.

Standards

HL7 International specifies a number of flexible standards, guidelines, and methodologies by which various healthcare systems can communicate with each other. Such guidelines or data standards are a set of rules that allow information to be shared and processed in a uniform and consistent manner. These data standards are meant to allow healthcare organizations to easily share clinical information. Theoretically, this ability to exchange information should help to minimize the tendency for medical care to be geographically isolated and highly variable.
HL7 International considers the following standards to be its primary standards – those standards that are most commonly used and implemented:
  • Version 2.x Messaging Standard – an interoperability specification for health and medical transactions
  • Version 3 Messaging Standard – an interoperability specification for health and medical transactions
  • Clinical Document Architecture – an exchange model for clinical documents, based on HL7 Version 3
  • Continuity of Care Document – a US specification for the exchange of medical summaries, based on CDA.
  • Structured Product Labeling – the published information that accompanies a medicine, based on HL7 Version 3
  • Clinical Context Object Workgroup – an interoperability specification for the visual integration of user applications
Other HL7 standards/methodologies include: