NIST/HL7 Experimental Registry

The Health Level Seven (HL7), ANSI-accredited standards organization, develops the HL7 standard for moving patient information between healthcare applications. It focuses on the interface requirements of the entire health care organization rather than the requirements of a particular area (e.g., medical devices). The HL7 standard is a messaging standard that provides a framework for building integrated healthcare systems. Systems that support the HL7 standard allow clinical data to be exchanged with other HL7 systems. This ability to share relevant information among diverse healthcare systems and provide consistent data across applications will help improve the quality of care as well as improved patient safety and a reduction in the cost of health care. [Source: http://www.hl7.org]

The HL7 standard is used by 90% of the hospitals in the U.S. The Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) in their effort to deliver health care services have mandated the use of HL7 as part of the government?s Consolidated Health Informatics Initiative (CHI) portfolio of standards. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) uses HL7 to exchange public health information at the federal, state and local levels. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is expected to require the use of HL7 to structure patient data submitted in support of payment claims, in the next version of HIPAA regulation. The HL7 standard is a cornerstone in the realization of the National Health Information Infrastructure (NHII) ? a way to connect distributed health data in the framework of a secure network.

NIST/ITL is collaborating with HL7 to improve current and future deployment of HL7 and to achieve healthcare information systems interoperability and sharing of electronic health information. To achieve this goal, NIST/ITL and HL7 are working to ensure that HL7 conformance can be defined and measured at appropriate levels, by building tools that will promote consistent definitions and reuse of conformant models and artifacts (e.g., profiles, templates, message types, codes, examples) within HL7 implementations. In particular, NIST/ITL is developing an HL7 Experimental Registry to both further the correctness of HL7 artifacts and their availability. The registry will serve as a tool to automatically validate specific HL7 artifacts to relevant parts of the standard as well as a repository that makes these conformant artifacts accessible for retrieval and reusable. Additionally, the HL7 Experimental Registry will enable HL7 to evaluate the usefulness of a document registry as a tool to help move HL7 conformance definition issues and implementation forward and foster the reuse of consensus-based HL7 models and artifacts.

The HL7 Experimental Registry will be featured in the upcoming HL7-IHE interoperability demonstration at the 2004 HIMSS Annual Conference and Exhibition, a conference that attracts over 20,000 professionals. The demonstration, called ?Standards Drive Healthcare Solutions?, is designed to raise awareness of the importance and use of information technology standards in healthcare.

Downloads

IHE Open Source Project: XDS software (html file)

Message Maker Prototype (html file)

Healthcare Standards Landscape (html file)

Healthcare Information Standards and Testing, A Concept Paper (pdf file)

Conformance Testing and Certification Framework, White Paper (pdf file)

What is This Thing Called Conformance, White Paper (html file)

Principles for Writing Conformance Criteria (pdf file)

Building HL7 EHR-S Conformance Criteria, Slide presentation (html file)