The HL7 Standard

The HL7 standard addresses the interfaces among various systems that send or receive healthcare focused information, such as patient admissions, registration, discharge or transfer (ADT) data, queries, resource and patient scheduling, orders, results, clinical observations, billing, master file update information, medical records, patient referral, and patient care. It does not try to assume a particular architecture with respect to the placement of data within applications but is designed to support a central patient care system as well as a more distributed environment where data resides in departmental systems. Instead, HL7 serves as a way for dissimilar applications and data architectures operating in a heterogeneous system environment to communicate with each other.