Know Healthcare 5 - HL7

HL7 – Health Level Seven is a standard for exchanging information between medical/healthcare applications. This standard defines a format for the transmission of health-related information. Examples being patient records, billing information lab records etc

Translators – Though multiple healthcare applications communicate using HL7, they might not use the same language internally. So we need translators to translate the incoming HL7 into a language that the application understands internally and vice versa. Example: You application might use ‘M’ to identify a male, but in HL7 terms a male could be represented as ‘XY’.

HL7 RIM – HL7 Reference Implementation Model (My Personal favorite) - An object model created as part of the HL7 Version 3.It is a big domain model diagram linking all the entities of HL7.If you create your DB and application models referring to it  , you are already on the right track to create a health care application.

Will write more on HL7 RIM in future posts.