HL7 International

Last updated
Health Level Seven International
AbbreviationHL7
Formation1987
Legal status Non-profit
Headquarters Ann Arbor, Michigan
Website hl7.org

Health Level Seven (HL7) International Inc. [1] 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. [2] It is accredited by ANSI.

Contents

History

Logo of Health Level Seven Inc. (2004).svg
Logo as of 2004

The HL7 community is organized in the form of a global organization (Health Level Seven International, Inc.) and country-specific affiliate organizations. Health Level Seven International, Inc. is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan. [3] 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. [4]

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 (known as the StatLAN protocol, originally defined at the University of California, San Francisco in the late 1970s). Membership initially consisted of those that had already implemented the StatLAN protocol. [4] 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. [5]

HL7 is one of several American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accredited Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) operating in the healthcare arena. [6] Most of these SDOs produce standards (sometimes called specifications or protocols) for a particular healthcare domain such as pharmacy, medical devices, imaging or insurance (claims processing) 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. [7]

HL7 International considers the following standards to be its primary standards – those standards that are most commonly used and implemented: [8]

Other HL7 standards/methodologies include: [11]

See also

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ "Comprehensive V2 to FHIR mapping course" (PDF). HL7.org. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2023-06-02.
  2. ↑ Shaver, Dave. "The HL7 Evolution - Comparing HL7 Versions 2 and 3" (PDF). Corepoint Health. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 May 2013. Retrieved 16 February 2012.
  3. ↑ "Contact Health Level Seven". Health Level Seven International.
  4. 1 2 "The early history of health Level 7". 2014-05-14. Ringholm.
  5. ↑ "About Health Level Seven". Health Level Seven International.
  6. ↑ http://www.ansi.org/ ANSI
  7. ↑ Joel Rodrigues (2010). Health Information Systems: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications, Volume 1. IGI Global. p. xxxix. ISBN   978-1-60566-988-5.
  8. ↑ "HL7 Primary Standards". Health Level Seven International.
  9. ↑ "HL7 Standards Product Brief - HL7 Version 2 Product Suite | HL7 International". www.hl7.org. Retrieved 2021-05-11.
  10. ↑ "HL7 Standards Product Brief - HL7 Version 3 Product Suite | HL7 International". www.hl7.org. Retrieved 2021-05-11.
  11. ↑ "HL7 Standards". Health Level Seven International.
  12. ↑ "Introduction to HL7 Standards | HL7 International". www.hl7.org. Retrieved 2021-05-11.
  13. ↑ "Electronic Health Record".
  14. ↑ "PHR System Functional Model".
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.