Health Level Seven Standards

Health Level Seven is a not-for-profit standard developing organization that is accredited by the ANSI (American National Standards Institute). Health Level Seven is responsible for creating the standards that are known as HL7 standards. These are a set of standards for the "exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information"1. The vision and mission of HL7 is focused on providing standards that encourage and enforce the secure access and exchange of health data. The standards are meant to do this in a way that enhances and encourages global health data interoperability. The level seven of HL7 refers to the seventh level of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) seven-layer communications model

Imagine one hospital with two or three different departments uniquely coding their information. Then imagine multiple hospitals doing the same thing. The exponential level of complications that would arise from every system creating and using their own version of information would have led to virtually no information exchange. Whatever exchange would occur in this setting would come at an excessive cost and effort, multiple stakeholders would have to come together to interpret each other's coding system. This is how clinical interface specialists realized that there was a need for a standard of information exchange that was overarching and at the same time not overly

The context of health data and the numerous factors that go into patient outcomes are important to understanding multiple population health issues. For example, in order to properly address the development of chronic disease, the excess healthcare costs of a system, or the rise in poor patient outcomes, analysts need full comprehensive health data. This data is scattered across various locations and sources, and for it to become useful it needs to be streamlined into a standardized format. For this reason, HL7's FHIR standard is becoming highly relevant to population health management