About HL7
Health Level Seven (HL7) provides standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of health information between systems within and across healthcare providers. HL7 provides a delimited, flat file-based message structure. Messages are event-based (order blood tests, receive test results, update patient information, and others). There is a corresponding message for each event.
Health organizations typically include numerous healthcare systems to process different patient administrative or clinical tasks, including billing, medication management, patient tracking, and documentation. These systems communicate when they receive new information or need to retrieve information. HL7 provides standards, guidelines, and methodologies for these systems to communicate with each other. The standards allow for the interoperability of healthcare data as it's shared and processed by different systems. This interoperability allows clinical and non-clinical data to be shared more easily with the goal of improving patient care and health system performance.