Glossary
HL7
HL7 is the international standard for exchanging clinical information between healthcare systems: records, orders, results and patient data. It lets a field system and a hospital system understand each other without custom development.
In healthcare operations outside the institution — transfers, home visits, medical certifications — it is what avoids transcription. What the professional records at the patient home enters the clinical system as it is, which is where time gets lost and where errors appear.
Its most recent version, FHIR, is built on web technologies and is the one being adopted in new integrations. When evaluating a supplier it is worth asking which of the two it supports, because they are not interchangeable.
Even with the standard, the integration is not automatic: each institution uses a subset of fields and its own catalogues. What HL7 avoids is arguing about the format; mapping the data is still a job that has to be done once.
Where GoDoWorks handles this:GDW Health