INTRODUCTION TO HL7 STANDARDS

(Just look this over and don't get bogged down in the details. )

Health Level Seven International is one of several American National Standards Institute (ANSI) -accredited Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) operating in the healthcare arena. Most 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.

The name HL7 comes from the seven levels of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model (which was discussed in an earlier week). Level Seven is the Application Level.

HL7 Mission: HL7 provides standards for interoperability that improve care delivery, optimize workflow, reduce ambiguity and enhance knowledge transfer among all of our stakeholders, including healthcare providers, government agencies, the vendor community, fellow SDOs and patients. In all of our processes we exhibit timeliness, scientific rigor and technical expertise without compromising transparency, accountability, practicality, or our willingness to put the needs of our stakeholders first.

HL7's Strategies:

Develop coherent, extendible standards that permit structured, encoded health care information of the type required to support patient care, to be exchanged between computer applications while preserving meaning.
Develop a formal methodology to support the creation of HL7 standards from the HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM).
Educate the healthcare industry, policy makers, and the general public concerning the benefits of healthcare information standardization generally and HL7 standards specifically.
Promote the use of HL7 standards world-wide through the creation of HL7 International Affiliate organizations, which participate in developing HL7 standards and which localize HL7 standards as required.
Stimulate, encourage and facilitate domain experts from healthcare industry stakeholder organizations to participate in HL7 to develop healthcare information standards in their area of expertise.
Collaborate with other standards development organizations and national and international sanctioning bodies (e.g. ANSI and ISO), in both the healthcare and information infrastructure domains to promote the use of supportive and compatible standards.
Collaborate with healthcare information technology users to ensure that HL7 standards meet real-world requirements, and that appropriate standards development efforts are initiated by HL7 to meet emergent requirements.

HL7 and its members provide a framework (and related standards) for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information. These standards define how information is packaged and communicated from one party to another, setting the language, structure and data types required for seamless integration between systems. HL7 standards support clinical practice and the management, delivery, and evaluation of health services, and are recognized as the most commonly used in the world.

HL7 standards are grouped into reference categories:

Section 1: Primary Standards - Primary standards are considered the most popular standards integral for system integrations, inter-operability and compliance. Our most frequently used and in-demand standards are in this category.
Section 2: Foundational Standards - Foundational standards define the fundamental tools and building blocks used to build the standards, and the technology infrastructure that implementers of HL7 standards must manage.
Section 3: Clinical and Administrative Domains - Messaging and document standards for clinical specialties and groups are found in this section. These standards are usually implemented once primary standards for the organization are in place.
Section 4: EHR Profiles - These standards provide functional models and profiles that enable the constructs for management of electronic health records.
Section 5: Implementation Guides - This section is for implementation guides and/or support documents created to be used in conjunction with an existing standard. All documents in this section serve as supplemental material for a parent standard.
Section 6: Rules and References - Technical specifications, programming structures and guidelines for software and standards development.
Section 7: Education & Awareness - Find HL7's Standards for Trial Use (STUs) and current projects here, as well as helpful resources and tools to further supplement understanding and adoption of HL7 standards.

Adapted from: http://www.hl7.org/about/FAQs/