Health Level Seven International
| Abbreviation | HL7 |
|---|---|
| Formation | 1987 |
| Legal status | Non-profit |
| Headquarters | Ann Arbor, Michigan |
| Website | www |
Health Level Seven International (HL7), is a non-profit organization involved in the development of international healthcare informatics interoperability standards known as Health Level 7 (HL7).
HL7 is an international community of healthcare subject matter experts and information scientists collaborating to create a framework (and related standards) for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information. HL7 promotes the use of such informatics standards within and among healthcare organizations to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare information delivery for the benefit of all.
The 2.x versions of the standards, which support clinical practice and the management, delivery, and evaluation of health services, are the most commonly used in the world.
The HL7 community is organized in the form of a global organization (Health Level Seven International, Inc.) and country-specific affiliate organizations:
The organizational structure of HL7 is as follows:
About 45% of the global membership (of either HL7 International Inc. or an HL7 affiliate) is located in Europe, 35% in North America, 15% in Asia-Oceania and 5% elsewhere.
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 (known as the StatLAN protocol, originally defined at the University of California, San Francisco in the late 1970s). 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 (ANSI) accredited Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) operating in the healthcare arena. Most of these 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.
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