What is HL-7?

Health Level Seven 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. HL7 is singular as it focuses on the interface requirements of the entire health care organization, while most other efforts focus on the requirements of a particular department. HL7 is best known for its messaging standards (v2 and v3), however it has also sponsored the development of numerous other standards including CDA (Clinical Document Architecture), CCOW (a front-end common context standard), Arden Syntax for representation of clinical knowledge and EHR functional specifications.

HL7 is made up of individual and organizational members covering a wide range of expertise including clinicians, payors, academics, developers and government agencies, It has over 25 international affiliate organizations spread throughout the globe

For more information, visit www.hl7.org and the CIHI website

What are the major differences between HL-7 V2.x and V3.x?

HL7 V3, like V2.x, is a standard for exchanging messages among information systems that implement healthcare applications. However, V3 strives to improve the V2 process and its outcomes. The original process for defining HL7 messages was established in 1987 and has served us well. The development principles behind HL7 V3 lead to a more robust, fully specified standard.

New capabilities offered in Version 3 include:

• Top-down message development emphasizing reuse across multiple contexts and semantic interoperability
• Representation of complex relationships
• Formalisms for vocabulary support
• Support for large scale integration
• Solving re-use and interoperability across multiple domain contexts
• A uniform set of models
• Expanded scope to include community medicine, epidemiology, veterinary medicine, clinical genomics, security, etc.
• HL7 v3 leverages object-oriented design and modeling
• HL7 is founded on a single reference model leveraged across all domains, improving consistency and interpretability of health information in applications supporting multiple disciplines.