Why Was HL7 Created?

Before the development of HL7, the process of data exchange between the healthcare systems was very difficult. The data exchange process required a great deal of programming on the side of both the sending and receiving applications. These interfaces were costly because there was no standard assortment of patient attributes. Accordingly, during the 1980s, the number of clinical interfaces in a typical hospital was little and the expense per interface was high.

HL7’s prime goal is to simplify the implementation of interfaces between medical care software applications and different vendors to diminish the cost engaged with custom interface programming.

Why do you need HL7?

Today most healthcare providers make use of various software for billing, patient record maintenance, updating patient data, etc. The major problem is that the communication between the software is very hard to achieve, even though they often need to talk to each other. And also, there will be some problems when two healthcare providers need to share information.

HL7 provides several standards and guidelines to help software vendors and healthcare providers store and uniformly move data. In this way, the applications can use the information without the help of special software for conversions. In simple, HL7 makes data sharing easy, which reduces the administrative burden on providers while improving care delivery.