ABSTRACT
Work on synoptic interoperability such as is contained in HL7v2 has been the most visible and, in many ways, the most successful contribution to the sharing of clinical and administrative health care data. In 1996, HL7v2 became an ANSI-accredited health care standard which put the overall HL7 efforts on a national and eventually international stage of Standards Developing Organizations. The shift from HL7v2 to HL7v3 represented a fundamental change from standards focused on messages that enable moving data from a source system to a recipient system to standards attempting to define the actual content of that data. The fact that more than a dozen years after HL7v3 was introduced there are still few actual implementations of the full suite of that version’s products, underscores one of the most significant challenges remaining in clinical data management and sharing—the development of standards for the content of the data used by clinicians to describe the diagnosis and treatment of their patients.
