Health Level Seven International


Health Level Seven International is a non-profit organization ANSI-accredited standards development organization dedicated to providing standards and solutions that empower global health data interoperability.
The 2.x versions of the standards are the most commonly used in the world.

Organization

The HL7 community is organized in the form of a global organization and country-specific affiliate organizations:
The organizational structure of HL7 is as follows:
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.

Collaboration and initiatives

HL7 collaborates with other standards development organizations and national and international sanctioning bodies, in both the healthcare and information infrastructure domains to promote the use of supportive and compatible standards. HL7 collaborates 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 has been adopted by ISO as a center of gravity in international standardization and has been accredited as a partnering organization for mutual issuing of standards. The first mutually published standard is ISO/HL7 21731:2006 Health informatics—HL7 version 3—Reference information model—Release 1.

Accelerator Program

In February 2019, HL7 launched the FHIR Accelerator Program designed to assist implementers across the health care spectrum in the creation of FHIR implementation guides or other informative documents. The program is based on an innovative model piloted by the HL7 Argonaut Project and the HL7 Da Vinci Project. The service will allow implementation communities to select a range of support solutions based on their own needs and resources, ranging from self-service templates and tools, to contracted project management, SME, and infrastructure service.

Argonaut Project

In 2014, HL7 launched the along with members of the private sector to advance industry adoption of modern, open interoperability standards such as HL7 FHIR. This effort follows on recommendations from the Joint HIT Standards and Policy Committee's JASON Task Force Report, the HIT Standards Committee’s NwHIN Power Team, the MITRE JASON Reports of 2013 and 2014, and the 2010 PCAST Report.

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:
Other HL7 standards/methodologies include:
HL7 encompasses the complete life cycle of a standards specification including the development, adoption, market recognition, utilization, and adherence.
In April, 2013, HL7's primary standards and other select products were made available for license at no cost. Most HL7 standards can now be deemed Open Standards.