Introduction of the Communication Standard Health Level Seven and HL7 Korea

Chang, Hyejung; Kwak, Yun Sik

Abstract

The implementation of hospital information systems and inter-hospital collaborative strategies are becoming popular, therefore patients' information exchange among healthcare organizations has increasingly been an important issue in Korea. To improve the efficiency of communicating electronic data between information systems, standardization is required. To introduce the Health Level Seven(HL7) to health systems in Korea as a standard for messaging and communication, Korea recently joined to HL7 as an international affiliate. The HL7 refers to the application level, the highest level of ISO communication model for Open Systems Interconnection(OSI), and adheres to a strict and well-defined set of operating procedures that ensures consensus, openness and balance of interest. This paper focuses on the review and introduction of the HL7 and planned activities of HL7 Korea. The HL7 Korea initiates encouragement of implementation of HL7 in health informatics, the most widely used being a messaging standard that enables disparate healthcare applications to exchange key sets of clinical and administrative data of patients. The HL7 Korea will play a pivotal role in expanding the use of HL7 in Korea to establish a cost effective way of efficiently sharing electronic patients' information nationally. A stepwise strategies for future activities of HL7 Korea are suggested as follows: 1) studying HL7 and training potential users; 2) piloting inter-hospital message communications by using HL7 interface engine to find applicability and compatibility of HL7 in Korea; 3) adapting HL7 as a standard for health informatics messaging and communication in Korea; and 4) continuing expansion of HL7 application nationwide.