HOSPITAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND HL7

Prof.Dr.Ir. Joachim Dudeck

Hospital Information Systems are becoming complex networks consisting of different application systems like patient administration, clinical laboratory, radiology etc. These systems have to communicate which each other, they have to exchange patient oriented and also administrative data automatically with no operator involvement. These systems almost always have completely different internal data structures, different data bases and data models. HL7 is a data communication standard which provides an exchange of data and information completely independent of the internal structure of the connected application system. HL7 started as a pragmatic data standard but has now adapted also other standards like Arden Syntax for knowledge representation, standards for visual integration of application systems (CCOW), the clinical document architecture (CDA) and is developing standards for guideline representation. It is now moving to the application of XML as an interchange and storage format and to model based, more consistent message structures. 16 international user groups represent the international character of this standard. In the presentation the main concepts of HL7 and its application in hospital information systems will be described.We will attempt to analyze the role and impact of the Internet technology on the medical field.