HL7 Standards - Section 6: Rules and References

Technical specifications, programming structures and guidelines for software and standards development.

Click a Standard to link to more detail.
Category Standards Description
Care Provision The Care Provision Domain addresses the information that is needed for the ongoing care of individuals, populations, and other targets of care. It is a statement of SUPERVISION, MANAGEMENT, and CUSTODY.
CCOW CCOW Context Management Specification is a standard for both internal applications programming and runtime environment infrastructure
Data Types Data types are thus the basic building blocks used to construct any higher order meaning: messages, computerized patient record documents, or business objects and their transactions.
Encoding Syntax Supports definition of a standard format and language for encoding knowledge and information, and representing and sharing that knowledge.
Financial Management These standards support patient accounting transactions, and the electronic exchange of health invoice (claim) data.
HHSFR The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published the Final Rule for Health Information Technology that included an Initial Set of Standards, Implementation Specifications, and Certification Criteria for Electronic Health Record Technology. The following HL7 standards are listed in the HHS' Final Rule. The table below briefly describes the purpose that each of the four standards will fulfill.
Laboratory HL7 products and publications concerning laboratory related information - ordering, specimen collection, specimen tracking, chain of custody, lab device automation (including point of care devices) and results reporting to address all of the requirements of the many stake holders and variations in different countries.
Patient Administration Requirements and specifications to support the interoperability among clinical and non-clinical systems regarding patient encounters and administrative registries.
Patient Care Defines the requirements and solutions to support the needs for communicating information regarding the creation, management, execution and the quality of care provision related to direct patient care in the areas of patient goals, problems, care plans/critical paths, assessments, and histories and physicals.
Personnel Management Standards and materials to support communication of human resources and regulatory information about individuals, animals, organizations and devices directly or indirectly involved in the delivery of healthcare services.
Public Health Standards and materials to support managment, reporting and investigation in the public health context.
Regulated Studies Supports exchange of information about the conduct of regulated studies, and the exchange of the data collected during those studies.
Scheduling Supports communication of various events related to the scheduling of generic appointments for healthcare services and/or for the use of resource slots.
Security and Privacy Standards for trustworthy communication, identity, and access management among all applications and services in HL7's scope.
Services Supports common architectural "services" and their behaviors and establishing an industry position on the form these services take.
Transport Specifications
Methodology Specifications HL7 message development methodology, models and management of the modeling process.
Terminology Supports communications and data storage use of encoded information and concept representations.
Clinical Statement The model described in this document is a 'pattern' designed to be used within multiple HL7 Version 3 domain models. This pattern is intended to facilitate the consistent design of communications that convey clinical information to meet specific use cases.
Community-Based Health This HL7 SFM specifies a means to conduct the discovery of appropriate real-world services (such as health specialty providers, laboratories, and inclusive of non-health services as well), provides mechanisms to access rudimentary resource management, such as scheduling; and identify and document the functional requirements pertaining to the identification and location of "business-services" important to healthcare.
Decision Support These specifications are for clinical decision support for use with the HL7 version 2 or version 3 family of standards.
XML Schemas The schema representations are provided for convenience, as the XML schema is a compact and specific way to describe the XML representation. However the schema is not in itself a normative part of this specification.
ANSI-approved Health Level Seven is one of several American National Standards Institute (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.