OID value: 2.16.840.1.113883
OID description:
Health Level Seven (HL7) is one of several ANSI-accredited Standards Developing Organizations
(SDOs) operating in the healthcare arena. Most 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. Headquartered in Ann Arbor, MI, Health Level Seven is like
most of the other SDOs in that it is a not-for-profit volunteer organization. Its members--
providers, vendors, consultants, government groups and others who have an interest in the
development and advancement of clinical and administrative standards for healthcare—develop
the standards. Like all ANSI-accredited SDOs, Health Level Seven adheres to a strict and
well-defined set of operating procedures that ensures consensus, openness and balance of
interest. A frequent misconception about Health Level Seven (and presumably about the other
SDOs) is that is develops software. In reality, Health Level Seven develops specifications, the
most widely used being a messaging standard that enables disparate healthcare applications
to exchange keys sets of clinical and administrative data.
Members of Health Level Seven are known collectively as the Working Group, which is currently organized into 14 technical committees and 14 special interest groups. The technical committees are directly responsible for the content of the Standards. Special interest groups serve as a test bed for exploring new areas that may need coverage in HL7’s published standards. A list of the technical committees and special interest groups as well as their missions, scopes and current leadership is available on this website.
As mentioned above, the most widely used HL7 specification, the Application Protocol for Electronic Data Exchange in Healthcare Environments is a messaging standard that enables disparate healthcare applications to exchange data. In its simplest form, the standard provides the layout of messages that are exchanged between two or more applications. The developers of the Health Level Seven Standard realized that real-world events, called trigger events in the Standard, cause the need for information to be exchanged between two or more systems. For example, when a patient is admitted to an inpatient facility, the finance department also needs to open an account for the patient. Using the Health Level Seven Standard, information such as the patient’s demographics and next of kin data that is collected by an ADT system at the time of an inpatient admittance can be electronically transmitted to a financial system and used to establish an account for the newly-admitted patient. Using the Health Level Seven standard to exchange data between systems saves time and money by eliminating the need to re-key data into multiple systems and/or to develop custom interfaces that would otherwise enable two system to exchange data.
URL for further info: http://www.hl7.org
See also the OID Repository website reference for 2.16.840.1.113883