HL7 conformance: how to do proper messaging

Abstract

Communication and cooperation between different applications is mediated by interfaces following corresponding standards. The interpretation of standards, the understanding of requirements and specification of solutions is very different within the vendor community. In a shared care environment based on extended inter-organizational inter-relationships, this interoperability has to be provided at semantic and service-oriented level. For that purpose, harmonized reference models, agreed terminologies, ontologies and concept representations as well as a unified development and deployment process have to be standardized. The latter also includes testing and certification procedures. The paper shortly introduces in the semantic interoperability approach provided by HL7.