HL7 Standards (Essay Sample)

IntroductionIn the recent years, the health care sector has received a great boost from the development of HL7 standards. These standards were designed by an international community of information scientist and experts in the field of medicine. HL7 standards have played a remarkable role marked by increased efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery to patients in clinics. As explicated in this paper, the HL7 standards have enabled reliable exchange, management, and integration of information obtained from numerous electronics devices by solving compatibility problems.According to an article written by Benson on the Principles of health interoperability HL7, the HL7 framework facilitates easier storage, retrieval, and hence faster way of managing clinical data (Benson, 2010). This in return reflects to improved services delivery to patients and other parties such as the government, and medical informatics.In 1980s the HL7 standard was primarily created to reduce the high costs of application interfaces used in hospitals. At this early age, the high costs of the software were driven by the fact that there were no standards set for collecting patients attributes. Each and every application required a custom design and expensive programming for both sending and receiving tasks. This phase was marked by small number of clinical interfaces used. However, in late 1990s, the number of interfaces was increasing due to reducing costs. The issue of compatibility was getting a solution as application developers shared knowledge of how applications were build.This was the success of like-minded and focused health care experts and application vendors who voluntarily discussed on how to make interfacing easier. This led to development of various versions of HL7. For instance, HL7 V2 was created by specialists in clinical field and real-world focused and user-led while V3 was created by medical informatics. The specialists in health care industry decided to create a standard way of building interfaces. This is because they had worked with clinical interface and understood the problems that emerged from the use of large and expensive custom interfaces. Therefore, the main objective of this group was to reduce the high cost of building interfaces (Benson, 2010).By the use of a loosely defined data model, messaging touch points were introduced between applications. Although this group successfully replaced custom interfaces, they faced a challenge since only the few volunteers had interest in the project. This project was based on 80/20 approach. This approach meant that 80 percent of the interface framework would be predefined while the 20 percent of the interface was left for uniqueness and customization depending on required use. This approach led to widespread acceptance of the standard.HL7 V2 standard was flexible, rigid and vague to enable easier adoption for applications and by 1998 enough vendors and health care providers had accepted and implemented HL7. These key players in the health care sector enjoyed 80 percent standard interfaces which was more advantageous than the 100 percent custom interfaces. By time, the V2 was more developed and refined to cover more areas. This was marked by the release of various versions in 1990, 1994, 1997, and 1999. The versions released were 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, and 2.3.1 respectively. They were compatible with one another and therefore, enabled a smooth upgrading process. As a result, the value of V2 increased and the community was able to solidify the remaining 20 percent on an interface by interface basis. However, as the market grew, the community noticed that 80 percent defined standard interface reflected a substantial work that needed to be done. This led to a frustration of the growing user base by the "non-standard" HL7 standard.The V2 standard had to be reviewed. This task was carried out by the government and medical informatics. The HL7 users had p...