Frequently Asked Questions

Established in 1987, Health Level Seven is an ANSI accredited, not-for-profit standards developing organization, whose mission is:

To provide a comprehensive framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery and evaluation of health services. Specifically, to create flexible, cost effective standards, guidelines, and methodologies to enable healthcare information system interoperability and sharing of electronic health records.

These efforts enable effective, efficient communication between the constituents of the healthcare community as represented by our membership, which consists of an international community of healthcare organizations, vendors, healthcare information systems developers, consultants, systems integrators, and related public and private health services agencies.

The mission of HL7 encompasses the complete 'life cycle' of a standards specification - development, adoption, market recognition, utilization and adherence. The HL7 specifications are unified by shared reference models of the healthcare and technical domains.

Click here for additional information about how HL7 is governed and organized.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the VA approached HL7 to accelerate the existing work of HL7’s EHR SIG to produce a standard in a short period of time that would be available for public use. The urgency of this initiative and HL7’s role in it was re-iterated by HHS Secretary Tommy Thomson on July 1. http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2003pres/20030701.html

HL7's standards are widely implemented worldwide and thus the HL7 organization is a well-known and respected ANSI-accredited standards group with broad industry participation. HL7 established an EHR special interest group in 2001 and that group had already produced some work on a proposed EHR standard. The ability to utilize and expand on the existing work of the HL7 EHR special interest group made HL7 a logical choice for the CMS project.

Health Level Seven is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Such accreditation, coupled with HL7’s own procedures, dictates that any standard that is published by HL7 and submitted to ANSI for approval be developed and ratified by a process that adheres to ANSI’s procedures for open consensus (www.ANSI.org). Two of the most important components of these procedures are openness and balance of interest. Openness means that anyone who is materially affected by the proposed standard must be allowed to participate in its development and/or the process by which it is ratified (voting). Membership within HL7 cannot be a criterion for this participation, although ANSI allows standards developing organizations to charge an administrative/participation fee to non-members who wish to participate. Individuals who are not members of HL7 but wish to be involved in the balloting process can register using this web site.

Balance of interest is a requirement that HL7 strive for near equal participation in the voting process by the various constituencies that are materially affected by the standard (e.g., vendors, providers, government agencies, consultants, non-profit organizations, etc.). This ensures that a particular constituency is neither banned from participating nor allowed to dominate the development and ratification of a proposed standard. I use the term “near equal” as it is impossible to ensure that the same number of vendors, providers, consultants, non-profit organizations, etc. will be interested in balloting any particular draft standard. The ANSI requirement is that no particular constituency account for more than 50% of the total number of voters who ratified a standard. HL7 is audited at least once every 5 year to ensure adherence to the ANSI procedures and its own established processes.