The Health Level Seven (HL7) organization is an ANSI accredited Standards Developing Organization. Volunteers from around the world gather in quarterly meetings called HL7 Working Groups. During these HL7 Working Group meetings, volunteers work to refine, gain consensus, and produce documentation that describes how clinical information will be exchanged between disparate healthcare applications.
What is the HL7 standard?
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.
As Chapter 1 of the HL7 Version 2.3 states, “HL7 provides a common framework for implementing interfaces between disparate vendors”. The HL7 standard is intentionally flexible.
HL7 is the acknowledged healthcare industry standard and the best protocol available to date for exchanging clinical data among disparate healthcare systems.
