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What Is HL7?

December 5th, 2006 by Scott McManis Print Friendly

The Health Level Seven (HL7) organization is an ANSI accredited Standards Developing Organization. Volunteers from around the world gather in quarterly meetings to produce and refine documentation that describes how clinical information will be shared between disparate healthcare applications in a provider setting.

What is HL7? Practically speaking, HL7 is the standard to which healthcare application vendors adhere when developing application interfaces to exchange patient data. The HL7 standard defines a method of moving clinical data between independent medical applications in near real time.

One would expect that by adopting the HL7 standard interfacing applications would be a ‘plug and play’ exercise. In reality, the commercial vendors of healthcare applications bend and customize HL7 to meet the needs of the customer and their systems. This is necessary to accurately exchange patient data.

Chapter 1 of the HL7 standard Version 2.3 states that “HL7 provides a common framework for implementing interfaces between disparate vendors”. The standard is intentionally flexible; designed to allow customization but inhibits ‘plug and play’ implementations.

In summary, HL7 Version 2 messaging is the acknowledged healthcare industry standard, and the best protocol available to date for exchanging clinical data among disparate cooperating systems in a healthcare setting.

Visit our HL7 Resources page for additional information or read through the topic category HL7 Terms.

Related posts:

  1. What Causes HL7 Messages to be Nonconformant?
  2. HL7 3.0 Considerations for Healthcare Providers (Clinics, Hospitals, Labs, Diagnostic Imaging)
  3. HL7 3.0 Considerations for Healthcare Vendors
  4. What Is Cardinality in HL7?
  5. What Is an ADT Message?
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    [...] What is HL7? Practically speaking, HL7 is the standard to which healthcare application vendors adhere when developing application interfaces to exchange patient data. The HL7 standarddefines a method of moving clinical data between independent medical applications in near real time. [...]

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    [...] terms to better understand what is HL7. In HL7 v2.x, the OBX is a segmentused to transmit a single observation or observation fragment.It [...]

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    [...] HL7 2.5 standard defines close to 500 different message types.While some are only used occasionally, [...]

  • http://www.hl7standards.com/blog/2006/10/05/what-are-the-components-of-an-hl7-message/ What Are the Components of an HL7 Message? | HL7 Standards

    [...] terms to better understand what is HL7. Each HL7 standard message is composed of groups and segments [...]

  • http://www.hl7standards.com/blog/2009/11/06/hl7-specifies-functional-requirements-for-clinical-research-in-an-ehr/ HL7 Specifies Functional Requirements for Clinical Research in an EHR | HL7 Standards

    [...] Health Level Seven (HL7) announced this week the industry’s first ANSI approved standard that “specifies the functional requirements for regulated clinical research in an electronic health record system (EHR-S).” [...]

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