HL7
Data sharing standards
Health Level Seven (HL7) is a set of technical standards for health information exchange between software applications. The name is a reference to the 7th layer, the application layer, in the OSI model. The standards are produced by HL7 International, an international standards organization, and are adopted by other standards-issuing bodies such as American National Standards Institute and International Organization for Standardization.
Purpose
Health organizations typically have many different computer systems used to process different patient administration or clinical tasks, such as billing, medication management, patient tracking, and documentation. All of these systems should communicate, or "interface", with each other when they receive new information or when they wish to retrieve information. HL7 International specifies a number of flexible standards, guidelines, and methodologies by which these healthcare systems can communicate with each other. The standards allow for easier 'interoperability' of healthcare data as it is shared and processed uniformly and consistently by the different systems. This allows clinical and non-clinical data to be shared more easily, theoretically improving patient care and health system performance.
Standards
HL7 International considers the following standards to be its primary standards – those standards that are most commonly used and implemented:
Version 2.x Messaging Standard – an interoperability specification for health and medical transactions
Version 3 Messaging Standard – an interoperability specification for health and medical transactions
Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) – an exchange model for clinical documents, based on HL7 Version 3
Continuity of Care Document (CCD) – a US specification for the exchange of medical summaries, based on CDA.
Structured Product Labeling (SPL) – the published information that accompanies a medicine, based on HL7 Version 3
Clinical Context Object Workgroup (CCOW) – an interoperability specification for the visual integration of user applications
Other HL7 standards/methodologies include:
Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) – a standard for the exchange of resources
Arden Syntax – a grammar for representing medical conditions and recommendations as a Medical Logic Module (MLM)
Claims Attachments – a Standard Healthcare Attachment to augment another healthcare transaction
Functional Specification of Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Personal Health Record (PHR) systems – a standardized description of health and medical functions sought for or available in such software applications
GELLO – a standard expression language used for clinical decision support
Version 2
The HL7 version 2 standard (also known as Pipehat) supports the day-to-day workflow of a hospital: administrative tasks, billing, logistics, and clinical processes such as orders and results. It was first released in 1987 and has been revised regularly since, producing more than ten versions (2.1 through 2.9).
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q327718. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “HL7” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.