Health Level 7

Health Level Seven (HL7), is an all-volunteer, not-for-profit organization involved in development of international healthcare standards. “HL7” is also used to refer to some of the specific standards created by the organization (i.e. HL7 v2.x, v3.0, HL7 RIM etc.).
HL7 and its members provide a framework (and related standards) for the exchange, integration, sharing and retrieval of electronic health information. v2.x of the standards, which support clinical practice and the management, delivery, and evaluation of health services, are the most commonly used in the world.

Organization Origin
HL7 is an international community of healthcare subject matter experts and information scientists collaborating to create standards for the exchange, management and integration of electronic healthcare information.

HL7 promotes the use of such standards within and among healthcare organizations to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare delivery for the benefit of all.
The HL7 community is organized in the form of a global organization (Health Level Seven, Inc.) and country-specific affiliate organizations.

• Health Level Seven, Inc. (HL7, Inc. ) is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.
• HL7 affiliate organizations, not-for-profit organizations incorporated in local jurisdictions, exist in over 40 countries. The first affiliate organization was created in Germany in 1993.

The organizational structure of HL7 Inc. is as follows:

• The organization is managed by a Board of Directors, which comprises 10 elected positions and three appointed positions.
• The Chief Executive Officer (currently Charles Jaffe, MD, PhD) serves as an ex officio member of and reports to the Board of Directors. The Chief Technology Officer (currently John Quinn); and the Chief Operations Officer (currently Mark McDougall) report to the CEO and also serve as ex officio members on the Board of Directors.
• Members of HL7 are known collectively as “The Working Group”. The Working Group is responsible for defining the HL7 standard protocol and is composed of Standing Administrative Committees and Working Groups.
• Standing Administrative committees focus on organizational or promotional activities, such as Education, Implementation, Marketing, Outreach Committee for Clinical Research, Publishing and Process Improvement and Tooling.
• Working groups are directly responsible for the content of the Standards, framing the actual language of the specifications.

Origin

HL7 was founded in 1987 to produce a standard for hospital information systems. HL7, Inc. is a standards organization that was accredited in 1994 by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

HL7 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.
Today, HL7 has been adopted by several national SDOs outside the U.S. Those SDOs are consequently not accredited by ANSI. However, HL7 is now adopted by ISO as a centre of gravity in international standardization and 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.

The Name "Health Level-7"

The name "Health Level-7" is a reference to the seventh "application" layer of the ISO OSI Reference model. 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.

Collaboration
HL7 collaborates 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. 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.
About 45% of the global membership (of either HL7 Inc. or an HL7 affiliate) is located in Europe, 35% in North America, 15% in Asia-Oceania and 5% elsewhere.