This document is prepared to explain the organizational structure and the working concept of HL7.

           HL7 as an Organization;

           HL7 working group was established as a committee, including the participants of the conference that was held in Pennsylvania University on March 1987. The committee was named as “HL7 Working Group”, and aimed to develop “Protocol Standards” for specific master Data Sets in health sector. The purpose of the usage of the standard was for the exchange of clinic, financial and administrative information of the systems health sector (Hospital Information Systems, Clinical Laboratory Systems, Pharmacy Systems and the Investment Systems).

           HL7 was recognized as an authorized Standard Developing Organization (SDO) by ANSI (American National Standard Institute) in June 1994. Like the most of the SDOs, HL7 is also originated as a non profit and voluntary group. Participants may be named as specialists, providers, vendors, consultants, governmental groups and individual volunteers. The membership of the working group is open for anyone that will assist the development and improvement of HL7. Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Czec Republic, Finland, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Lituania, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan and England have HL7 member organizations.

          HL7, as an organization, maintained important improvement within last a few years, 400-500 of members and external participants systematically joined to the meetings, established for the last 3 years. In all cathegories including “Our Company”, there are more than 2200 “Health Industry” members. HL7 standard, was applied to about a few hundred societies computer interfaces according to 1998. Especially used in most of the hospitals in United States. Organization has published eleven American National Standard.

           Organizational Structure;

           Like the other ANSI approved SDO's HL7 too, is also administrated with well determined procedures to provide consensus and clarity. Every member has the righ of a vote. On administrative elections an online or posted pack including the information of the candidates profile is sent to every single member.

           Organization is made up of, Technical Committees responsible for HL7 standart protocol definition and Specific Interest Groups. Each Technical Committee and Specific Interest Group are represented by 2 or more co-chairs. Co-chairs collectively form the Technical Guiding Committee, that ballots the total publishing of the relevant standards. The votes of the Technical Guiding Committee are as recommendation to the Board of Directors for the final decision. Board of Directors have 8 members. All HL7 members are encouraged to join these committees.

           HL7, has a close relationship with the other standard developer organizations. IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), CEN (European Committee for Standardization), ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) & OASIS Accredited Standards Committee X12N (ASC X12N), American College of Radiology (ACR), National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA), Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC), Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) are some of these.

           What is the meaning of name HL7?

           Term Level 7 (Seven), indicates the (seventh) highest level of “Application Level” of   OSI (Open System Interconnection) which is the open communication model of International Standardization Organization (ISO) OSI Reference model, consists of the least level Physical Layer and highest level Application Layer, totally 7 levels. Application level, defines the data exchange, data exchange timing and communication failures. This level consists of security controls, ID authentication, other existing conrtrols and data exchange. HL7 posses the OSI model, application interface seventh level conceptual definition.

           HL7 as a Standard;

           Encoding rules document version 2.2, was published in December 1994 by the organization, In 1996 accredited as a “Standard” by ANSI. Version 2.3 is published by the active HL7 members voluntary efforts of more than two years and received the ANSI approval in May 1997. In May 1999 the version 2.3.1 was accredited by ANSI, and version 2.4 was sent to ANSI for the same qualification. Version 2.4 was approved by ANSI in October 2002.

           Standard defines the health data, the exchange of   form and content determined messages between applications, data structure, exchange timings and the structure of the errors specific to inter application communications. It doesn’t concern with the storage of data by the applications, the way of the usages and transmitting tools. It doesn’t concern with solving the differences of the architecture and suppositions for various systems architectural structure.

           Standard is in effort of orientation of the interfaces of Patient Admit/Registry, Data Transfer, Queries, Source and Patient Schedules, Orders, Results, Clinical Observations, Billing, Master File Updates, Medical Records, Scheduling and Patient Care. The selected interfaces are evaluated as high priority by the standard writing volunteers. Each version of the Standard is produced in a way to obtain the continuing the present interface definitions and additional other definitions.

           Usage;

           Various healthcare societies, different systems used on associations, shows that there will be a lot of interfaces that benefit from the standard. The diversity of the data definitions and the usage prevents the “plug-play” usage of the standard. The existing systems should be arranged to use the standard and the future systems should be planned to be concordant by the software producers. The healthcare facilities may use the HL7 standard, without being a member, through vendors. HL7 presents advantages of system communications using partially or totally the standard. Internet Explorer or Netscape programs, by using HTTP & HTML standard protocols, can establish connections with web services of “Open System Architecture.” By using the standard these systems will be able to connect web services that will be established in future. The systems using this protocols and this architecture may establish independent connections from service providers.

           On HL7 usage, other systems that use HL7 are added into communicating systems. No alterations are needed on the existing system for the new system. The master aim of the healthcare facilities and the private hospitals are to reduce paper work, maintain cash flow, assist administrative decisions, preventing losses and to assume the patient as the subject for the qualified services. The aim is defined as; only the authorized personnel should reach the necessary information of the patient and the healthcare informations should be kept in electronical environment for life-time.

           On a mid-scaled hospital it is a common situation of using a computer system for patient admission, hospitalising, transfer, clinic laboratory, radiology, departure, billing & accountancy transactions. Due to the system development the data sharing should be maintained among systems. HL7 at this point, provides the data transactions of the various systems, appropriate to the various operating systems and programming languages, multiple communication environments. A single process can be transmitted quickly where multiple processes are transmitted by file transactions. Application specific code definitions, tables an messages are supported by the Standard.