International Standard HL7 – a Pathway to Better Healthcare

The European Centre for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology – Cardio participated in organizing the workshop International Standard HL7 – a Pathway to Better Healthcare.

The workshop took place on April 20th, 2001 in Medical House in Prague. There were more than 60 participants. The main organizer was the Czech Medical Association of Jan Evangelista Purkyne, Society of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Informatics . The firm Advanced Medical Information Systems was another organizer. The workshop was opened by Prof. RNDr. Jana Zvárová, DrSc. who introduced organizing institutions and lecturers. Prof. Dr. W. Ed Hammond from American Duke University in Durham spoke about the organisation HL7 and about extent of its activities. He focused on the Version 2.4 but he spoke also about the new version 3.0. He introduced to listeners the Reference Information Model and activities connected with the group such as Technical Committees oriented at vocabulary, structured documents and decision-making support. Prof. Dr. J. W. Dudeck from German University in Geissen spoke in his lecture about messages for patient administration, placing order forms and results reporting as the mostly implemented messages of the HL7 Standard. The research worker of Australian Ballart University Dr. K. D. Veil described in his lecture flexibility and possible ways of the HL7 standard implementation in the Czech Republic. The last lecture of Dr. K. U. Heitmanna from German Cologne University dealt with HL7 and XML. The first XML standard developed within HL7 is the CDA Architecture (Clinical Document Architecture), which is now the ANSI standard based on XML and which is determined for structured documents in healthcare. The meeting in Prague dedicated to the standard HL7 brought the newest information about the development of the standard HL7 into the Czech Republic. The Czech group of HL7 users led by RNDr. V. Koksa, PhD. translated the brochure about the HL7 standards into the Czech language. This brochure was available for all participants. Everything indicates that standardization is an important tool for improving health care and it will play even bigger role in development of an information society in healthcare.