In today's healthcare industry, interoperability and data sharing are critical components for delivering high-quality patient care. However, with the use of multiple software systems across healthcare organizations, exchanging clinical data between different systems can be a challenging task.
The Health Level Seven (HL7) EHR functional model is a set of rules and standards that aim to facilitate data interoperability in healthcare. By standardizing the information and its structure, the HL7 EHR rules provide an opportunity to connect different solutions with EHR systems developed using various technologies. This approach is compliant with most health data transferring policies and ensures that confidential data remains unexposed.
The HL7 vision is to create a world in which everyone can securely access and use the right health data when and where they need it. To achieve this vision, HL7 offers different versions of EHR standards that define how documents are structured, what data types are used, and what languages are utilized.
HL7 Version 2 is a legacy standard that lacks some features, but many 2.X versions are compatible with each other. HL7 Version 3 is a newer version of the HL7 standards that offers additional features and uses XML to share messages. However, it is not backward compatible with the 2.X versions, so healthcare providers did not widely adopt it. CDA is the document creation standard that defines rules for composing medical documents, and FHIR is the newest standard that offers many forward-looking features.
The HL7 EHR functional model enables healthcare systems to exchange data using messages formatted according to specific clinical data standards. Different software solutions can be connected using an integration engine that turns domain-specific data into HL7 messages. There are dozens of HL7 message types that help share different kinds of health data, including Admit, Discharge, and Transfer (ADT), Observation Result (ORU), Medical Document Management (MDM), and more.
In conclusion, HL7 EHR standards are the key to effective clinical data sharing between hospitals and different systems in a healthcare organization. With the use of HL7 standards, healthcare organizations can standardize their information, structure, and connect different solutions with EHR systems developed using various technologies. As a result, HL7 helps to achieve interoperability and ensure the secure exchange of health data, which is critical for delivering high-quality patient care.
