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Health Level 7 (HL7) is the leading international standard for data exchange between computer systems in healthcare. It enables interoperability between electronic Patient Administration Systems (PAS), Electronic Practice Management (EPM) systems, Laboratory Information Systems (LIS), Dietary, Pharmacy and Billing systems as well as Electronic Medical Record (EMR) or Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems.
"Health Level 7" ("HL7") is used as a term both for the organisations involved in developing and supporting the healthcare standards as well as for the Version 2.x and Version 3 sets of standards and other standards developed by the HL7 local organisations in 30 countries. HL7 creates international standards for inter-system and inter-organisation messaging, for decision support, clinical text document mark-up, user interface integration as well as a health data model and message development methodology. HL7 is a not-for-profit, open, democratic and consensus-based organisation.
HL7's mission is: "To provide (global) standards for the exchange, management and integration of data that supports clinical patient care and the management, delivery and evaluation of healthcare services. Specifically, to create flexible, cost effective approaches, standards, guidelines, methodologies, and enable healthcare information system interoperability and sharing of electronic health records."
A frequent misconception about Health Level Seven is that it develops software. In reality, HL7 develops specifications, the most widely known being a messaging standard (HL7 V2.x) that enables disparate healthcare applications to exchange clinical and administrative data.
Members of Health Level Seven are known collectively as the Working Group, which is organized into Technical Committees and Special Interest Groups. The Technical Committees (TCs) are directly responsible for the content of the Standards. Special Interest Groups (SIGs) serve as a test bed for exploring new areas that may need coverage in HL7s published standards. A list of the technical committees and special interest groups as well as their missions, scopes and current leadership is available on the HL7.org web site.
The HL7 standards can be implemented free-of-charge; there are no development or run-time licenses or fees. However, the not-for-profit HL7 organisation is always grateful for volunteer or financial support. Although distributions of the current HL7 standards attract a small fee, previous versions of the HL7 V2.x standards are freely available (http://www.HL7.org/library/General/v231.zip).
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