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HL7 Version 3: It’s Live, It’s Real Print E-mail
Wednesday, 08 March 2006
Health Level Seven Releases Long-Awaited Version 3 Normative Edition 2005

Health Level Seven (HL7), one of the world’s most prolific healthcare standards developers, announced today that after more than a decade of hard work by scores of dedicated HL7 members worldwide, its long-awaited Version 3 (V3) Normative Edition 2005—a suite of dozens of specifications all based on HL7’s Reference Information Model (RIM)—has been released and is being distributed to all HL7 members.

“The publication of the first Version 3 Normative Edition is a major milestone for HL7,” said HL7 Chair Mark Shafarman. “It represents a significant contribution to solving the global problem of integrating healthcare information in a way that supports multiple goals, ranging from individual patient care to clinical research to public health.”

This edition represents the first publication of a complete suite of V3 specifications, each of which has received formal approval as either a Normative Standard or a Draft Standard for Trial Use. “This suite provides a single source that allows implementers of V3 specifications to work with the full set of messages, data types, and terminologies needed to build a complete implementation,” said Woody Beeler, HL7 Board member and co-chair of HL7’s Modeling and Methodology technical committee.

Throughout the course of V3 development, HL7 has focused on a few salient features that are its hallmarks. In brief, these are:
  • A focus on semantic interoperability by specifying that information be presented in a complete clinical context that
  • assures the sending and receiving systems share the meaning (semantics) of the information being exchanged;
  • It’s designed for universal application so that the standards can have the broadest possible global impact and yet be adapted to meet local and regional requirements;
  • Model-based specifications that provide consistent representation of data laterally across the various HL7 domains of interest and longitudinally over time as new requirements arise and new fields of clinical endeavor are addressed;
  • Technology-neutral standards that allow HL7 and the implementers of HL7 standards to take advantage, at any point in time, of the latest and most effective implementation technologies available; and
  • It’s founded on a development methodology and meta-model that assures consistent development and the ability to store and manipulate the specifications in robust data repositories rather than as word-processing documents.
Even though V3 specifications are just beginning to be implemented, Beeler says the value of these core features is already apparent. “The semantic integrity of the specifications has led to their adoption for major projects developing national health care record systems in several countries,” he said.

Read the full press release here.
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 08 March 2006 )
 
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