Semantic interoperability in healthcare can be achieved by a tighter coupling of terminology and HL7 message models. In this paper, we highlight the difficulty of achieving this goal, but show how it can become attainable by basing HL7 message models on SNOMED CT concepts and relationships. We then demonstrate how this methodology has been applied to a set of clinical observations for use in th...

Infobuttons are clinical decision support tools that use information about the clinical context (institution, user, patient) in which an information need arises to provide direct access to relevant information from knowledge resources. Two freely available resources make infobutton implementation possible for virtually any EHR system. OpenInfobutton is an HL7-compliant system that accepts conte...

The following article on HL7 Version 3 will give readers a glimpse into the significant differences between “what came before”—that is, HL7 Version 2.x—and “what today and the future will bring,” which is the HL7 Version 3 family of data interchange specifications. The difference between V2.x and V3 is significant, and it exists because the various stakeholders in the HL7 development process be...

The Health Level 7 (HL7) v3 standard provides information models for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information. Those models are defined in a graphical modeling language other than the UML standard. It involves the development of new tools and the need for specific training in order to support and understand the particularities within HL7 v3 models. We p...

Health Level Seven (HL7) is an emerging standard in the healthcare industry. HL7 version 3.0 (v3) targets to achieve semantic interoperability among the healthcare systems through HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM). In any healthcare system, information is ultimately stored in the database, which requires mapping of database to HL7 RIM. A key bottleneck in building HL7 systems is the laborio...

OBJECTIVE Inefficiencies in clinical trial data collection cause delays, increase costs, and may reduce clinician participation in medical research. In this proof-of-concept study, we examine the feasibility of using point-of-care data capture for both the medical record and clinical research in the setting of a working clinical trial. We hypothesized that by doing so, we could increase reuse o...

Health care provides many opportunities in which the sharing of data between independent sites is highly desirable. Several standards are required to produce the functional and semantic interoperability necessary to support the exchange of such data: a common reference information model, a common set of data elements, a common terminology, common data structures, and a common transport standard...

Problem statement: Most of healthcare data exchanges are textual, poorly structured and often not accessible by clinical professionals. Otherwise, the variety of medical applications and medical standards makes difficult sharing and communicating healthcare data in a highly heterogeneous environment. Approach: XML and related standards (XML schema, XSL) provided an infrastructure that might cha...

The HL7 Vocabulary Technical Committee (TC) was organized to select and maintain the vocabulary used in HL7 messages. The goal is to make implementations of the Version 3 HL7 Standard more plug-and-play compatible. In order to make the vocabulary readily accessible to the public, HL7 is collaborating with the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) to include HL7 vocabulary in the Unified Medic...

they have additional information on their patients’ health and clinical statuses. The information could be acquired directly from patients or electronically from other providers through healthcare information exchanges (HIE). In the latter case, a common language or standard is necessary for sending and receiving digital forms of clinical data among healthcare organizations. On February 12, 200...