Introduction to HL7: Content

eLearning Initiative: Introduction to HL7

Co-developed by Education and Process Improvement Committees

What will I learn?

• What are the problems HL7 may solve? (Pain Points)
• What is HL7?
• What are the standards HL7 creates?
• Who are the participants?
• How do HL7 standards get developed?
• How do I get involved?
• Where do I go for additional information?
• How are meetings organized?

What pain points does HL7 Standards address?

• Within four walls of the hospital
• Get out of the paper business
• Pharmacy
• Trading Partners
• Jill Kaufman

What is HL7?

Health Level Seven is one of several American National Standards Institute (ANSI) -accredited Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) operating in the healthcare arena. Most SDOs produce standards (sometimes called specifications or protocols) for a particular healthcare domain such as pharmacy, medical devices, imaging or insurance (claims processing) transactions. Health Level Seven’s domain is clinical and administrative data.

Headquartered in Ann Arbor, MI, Health Level Seven is like most of the other SDOs in that it is a not-for-profit volunteer organization. Its members-- providers, vendors, payers, consultants, government groups and others who have an interest in the development and advancement of clinical and administrative standards for healthcare—develop the standards. Like all ANSI-accredited SDOs, Health Level Seven adheres to a strict and well-defined set of operating procedures that ensures consensus, openness and balance of interest. A frequent misconception about Health Level Seven (and presumably about the other SDOs) is that it develops software. In reality, Health Level Seven develops specifications, the most widely used being a messaging standard that enables disparate healthcare applications to exchange keys sets of clinical and administrative data.

HL7 Mission

HL7 is an international community of healthcare subject matter experts and information scientists collaborating to create standards for the exchange, management and integration of electronic healthcare information. HL7 promotes the use of such standards within and among healthcare organizations to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare delivery for the benefit of all.

Strategies

HL7's Strategies:

• Develop coherent, extendible standards that permit structured, encoded health care information of the type required to support patient care, to be exchanged between computer applications while preserving meaning.
• Develop a formal methodology to support the creation of HL7 standards from the HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM).
• Educate the healthcare industry, policy makers, and the general public concerning the benefits of healthcare information standardization generally and HL7 standards specifically.
• Promote the use of HL7 standards world-wide through the creation of HL7 International Affiliate organizations, which participate in developing HL7 standards and which localize HL7 standards as required.
• Stimulate, encourage and facilitate domain experts from healthcare industry stakeholder organizations to participate in HL7 to develop healthcare information standards in their area of expertise.
• Collaborate with other standards development organizations and national and international sanctioning bodies (e.g. ANSI and ISO), in both the healthcare and information infrastructure domains to promote the use of supportive and compatible standards.
• Collaborate with healthcare information technology users to ensure that HL7 standards meet real-world requirements, and that appropriate standards development efforts are initiated by HL7 to meet emergent requirements.

Interoperability Goal

"Text needed – may be covered in strategy so TBD. Abdul-Malik will pull together wording.'"

International Goal

"Text to be provided by International Team – Nancy will reach out to Kai for text.'"

International Mentoring Committee

• Purpose
• IMC Links/contacts
• Success Stories
• Affiliate page link

"John Ritter will develop this content. Nancy will outline for John what he needs to develop, level of detail, etc."

Who is HL7?

• Providers, vendors, payers, consultants, government and others who have an interest in the development and advancement of clinical and administrative standards for healthcare
• Membership is open to:
  

-U.S. members as organizations or individuals (Varying levels of financial support that provide increasing membership benefits for organizations.)
-Affiliate HL7 chapters and their members from dozens of countries around he world (Under our restructuring plan, the U.S. will become an Affiliate of an international HL7 organization by 2010.)
-Government and Foundation members provide additional perspectives, contracts, grants, and early adoption of draft standards.
-Paid staff provides publishing, conference management, and other services for the membership. HL7 is in transition to a new structure with a paid CEO and staff responsible for the HL7 financial model, marketing and more.

--Slf170 13:00, 26 February 2007 (CST) "Sheila will take this one.'"

Membership

Membership in HL7 is available to everyone interested in the development of a cost-effective approach to system connectivity. Involvement and support from HL7's members is crucial to the ongoing expansion and enhancement of the HL7 standard and the overall success of the organization.

Individual or Organizational Membership:

Individual memberships are geared to those with a personal interest in the standard and should not reflect an affiliation to an organization or employer, while organizational memberships are designed for those who will be using the standard for business purposes.

Organizational memberships include benefits crucial to those who rely on the standard as part of their business plan -- the most critical of these being the right to distribute the standard to clients (i.e., as part of technical documentation or proposals) or to distribute the standard within their organization. An individual member may not use, copy, or distribute the standard for any purpose other than their personal participation in the maintenance and development of HL7 Standards.

Involvement

• WGMs
• Conference Calls
• Standards development
• HL7 business/infrastructure

.. "TBD'"

Work Group Meetings

Describe the activities at WGMs i.e. business, ballot reconciliation, standards creation, etc.

"Nancy'"

Staff

Pull in the current staff information from the website.

"Nancy will reach out to Karen.'"

ANSI, SDOs:

Text describing the role of each in relation to HL7.

• ANSI
• X12
• NCPDP

"Abdul-Malik'"

Alliances, MOUs, Agreements

Define Alliances, MOU, and Agreements, where and how they are relevant. Obtain a list of major ones with a link to all, or all if the list is manageable, with brief summary of relationship. "Abdul-Malik'"

How are standards developed?

Insert a picture of process.

"In the co-chair handbook, June but not the next meeting.'"

Describe the picture

Text to be developed.

"In the co-chair handbook, June but not the next meeting.'"

Technical Committees, SIGS, Technical Steering Committee

New Organization Text needed here

"Ed, per email will take this'"

Board Appointed Committees

Pull in the current list of board appointed committees from the HL7 website. Text describing need, term, reasoning, etc.

"Nancy will request of Chuck.'"

Committee Processes

• DMP
• List Servers
• Wiki use

Text describing how one find out how a particular committee functions and uses the above?

"This is open; however, Jim will gather already existing presentations that may have valuable information for a number of slides. If he posts any presentations he will reference specific pages."

Projects

What defines a project?

HL7 work effort or work product is considered a project if it:

• involves a group outside of HL7 (may require Board approval),
• requires external funding (may require Board approval),
• is going to be balloted,
• requires cross-committee participation, or
• is determined to be a project by the committee

All projects will have a project scope statement.

An HL7 project:

• has an objective
• will have a finite existence (the end date to be determined by the resources available and the start date), and
• will have a budget (though it may be looking for funding to support that budget

What are project criteria?

An HL7 project will:

• Be consistent with HL7 strategic direction
• Include appropriate project documentation - project charter, scope, resources, timelines, assumptions, constraints, planned deliverables, etc. per PMO methodology
• Be aligned with market demand
• Be sponsored by stakeholders intending to implement the product produced by the project
• Define a reasonable balloting strategy to meet market demand and implementation timelines
• Define how the project will engage with other impacted committees
• Follow project approval protocols to ensure appropriate project socialization and sign-off has taken place

How do they start?

HL7 project process:

• A request is made to the HL7 Board, an HL7 Board-appointed committee, an HL7 Technical Committee (TC), or an HL7 Special Interest Group (SIG). This group will be referred to as the responsible group.

Anyone can make a request

A request can be a specific proposal or as a result of cross-domain discussions. There is recognition of a work effort that is needed to be done and a project is needed to be formed (meets the definition of a project), coordinated and exposed to more than those that are doing the work.

• Obtain approval for request

If this request is within scope of an existing project, the requestor (and other interested parties) should be referred to that project for approval to be included. No new project is formed.

An example of folding a request into an existing project: Proposals for Version 2.7 Chapter 2a. Once a decision is made for a Version 2.7 for Chapter 2a, new proposals might be able to be subsumed in the current committee level ballot preparation work if the committee agrees.

If not part of another project and one or more of the following is true for this request, this request is considered a project:

involves a group outside of HL7 (may require Board approval)

requires external funding (may require Board approval)

is going to be balloted

requires cross-committee participation

is determined to be a project by the committee

• Prepare Project Scope Statement

A graphic of the project lifecycle:

What are some project examples?

The following HL7 page is the transition - Project Lifecycle Task Force documents library.Project Lifecycle Task Force. Located under the Historical SITF Documents Directory, a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation called, "HL7 Transition Team Project Lifecycle (TTPL) 2007-01-08.ppt" can be opened and viewed for alternative information.

DISPLAY CURRENT LIST OF PROJECTS FROM WEB SITE

DESCRIBE EXAMPLES

LINK TO CURRENT LIST

Why get involved in HL7?

• Learn about HL7 Standards
• Write HL7 Standards
• Influence Direction
• Other …

"June"

Marketing?

Marketing Page Marketing Committee to input to text here.

"The timing on this slide is not coming together with the new work marketing folks are doing. The group has decided this slide is not a priority.'"

Where do I go from here? Example 1

Develop an example of type of person coming to the site i.e. “I have joined an IT department for laboratory vendor.” Questions to answer with guidance text.

"June will provide an outline of steps. Nancy will provide an example."

Where do I go from here? Example 2

Develop a second example that addresses getting information around increasing use of standards in my organization.

"This slide could be used for the example Nancy is providing for the previous slide.'"

HL7 Website

Link plus description of where to start. This should address new website design and links.

"Nancy with June as secondary."

"This slide may need to be moved elsewhere."

Getting Involved

• Determine target committee (s)
• Sign up for the list serve (s) Link to list serve signup
• Conference call schedule (s) Link to conference call schedule calendar.
• Register for the next meeting Link to brochure and registration page for the next WGM.

"June will incorporate this slide into WHere do I go from here?"

Contacting Committees

• Co-chair
• Use of list serve
• Other …

"Nancy"

What if I cannot attend meetings?

Recruitment text to the value of other participation.

"Nancy"

Links Page

Consolidated list of links referenced in the presentation. Any additional links that may be appropriate.

"Nancy"