What are HL7 Standards in Healthcare?
What Are HL7 Standards?
HL7 standards regulate the formatting, structure, and exchange of healthcare data between systems. This ensures the information (notes, orders, lab results, and summaries) is accurate and safe.
With Heidi’s AI-powered documentation tools, clinicians can produce notes that align with structured workflows across settings.
Heidi can help you:
- Standardize terminology and sections using templates across your team
- Save time spent preparing documentation for transitions of care, referrals, or shared-care environments
Why Are HL7 Standards Important?
HL7 standards are crucial because they supply different healthcare systems a common language foundation for seamless data exchange. As a result, hospitals, labs, and clinics can share crucial patient data uniformly. This ensures care continuity and helps staff make clinical decisions much faster.
Enable Interoperability Across Healthcare Software
HL7 gives systems a uniform and standard way to organize and exchange clinical information. It defines how information such as patient demographics, medications, allergies, encounters, diagnostic codes, and summaries should be formatted and shared across different healthcare software.
HL7 standards help minimize mismatched fields, missing values, and ambiguous documentation.
Heidi uses Epic APIs in its Epic Integration to build note templates for structured documentation across different specialties and ensures this documentation remains consistent and easy to read.
Help Clinicians Spend Less Time On Administrative Work
Software like Electronic Health Records (EHRs), laboratory information systems (LIS), and billing software interact and communicate because of HL7 standards. In addition, HL7 has a common framework for data exchange with a framework based on “trigger events” (like a patient admission or ready lab result). If one trigger event occurs, it automates an ADT or ORU (observation results) message and updates information without the need for human intervention in all relevant systems.
Discharges flow with fewer gaps. Clinicians see a clearer picture of the patient’s story and can stay present in the room, cultivating better care.
Heidi’s session notes feature delivers a precise summary of the patient interaction.
Support Regulatory And Compliance Requirements Across Health Systems
HL7 standards provide defined mechanisms for encryption and access control, and these protections function as core technical safeguards required under privacy regulations. It is a regulatory enabler in the U.S and used by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) for study data electronic submissions and adverse event reporting (eMDR/ICSR).
The implementation of HL7 supports the technical requirements for different laws worldwide such as the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
In Australia, HL7 Australia is the national affiliate for HL7 and collaborates with Standards Australia on the implementation and specifications based on HL7.
Heidi’s compliance puts HL7’s provided framework into practice by ensuring every note, referral and update remains seamless throughout intersystem exchanges.
Here are some real-world illustrations of how the HL7 standards are applied.
The Real-World Impact of HL7 Standards Compliance
Compliance with the HL7 standards promotes a better way for clinicians to streamline care operations. It has many applications in real clinical workflows, which include the following:
Creates a Shared Clinical Language Across Systems
Standardized segments and fields in health information are consistent.
For clinicians, this clarifies and ensures clinical notes, orders and summaries are consistent especially during handovers. For instance, automated ADT alerts to primary care clinicians have been shown to lower 30-day readmissions. They keep the right clinician informed at the right time, supporting safer transitions in care.
A recent review of studies showed steady growth in how HL7 FHIR is used for digital health and chronic disease management: about 45% of the projects focused on cancer, over 15% on cardiovascular disease, and about 15% on diabetes.
Reduces Workflow Friction for Clinicians
According to a US technical brief from one year ago, sharing laboratory data in a standard, interoperable format such as HL7 helps prevent clinicians from ordering duplicate or unnecessary tests.
As a result, a system built on HL7 inherits these gains: structured lab data, consistent documentation, and smoother cross-system communication.
After integrating Heidi into his workflow, psychiatrist Dr. Ifeanyi Olele’s workflow became more efficient. “At the end of the day, I can go on and catch up on messages or just be more engaged and present at home with my wife and kids,” he added.
Before, he struggled with clinical documentation that would often stack up throughout the week.
This was also something that helped Hong Kong Foot Clinic in solving their problems with information recall and cognitive overload, inconsistent clinical documentation and communication breakdowns.
After using Heidi, the clinic’s very own Dr. Allison Rooney now spends less time worrying about what she might forget, and more time engaging deeply with her patients thanks to Heidi’s note generation and transcript features. She can now document patient care with confidence, without relying on memory or keeping track of paper handouts.
This is something that other GPs and specialists can also benefit from.
Watch this video on how to generate clinical codes with Heidi
Everything Clinicians Need to Know About HL7 Standards
HL7 standards aid in reducing clinical data errors and strengthen healthcare communication. Here are other things that you may need to know about HL7 standards.
How HL7 Standards Work
HL7 standards operate through two major families of standards: HL7 V2 and HL7 FHIR.
The US healthcare system implements HL7 V2 and sends structured messages between systems whenever a clinical event occurs. For example, a clinician orders a blood test; this leads to the EHR sending an ORM (order-based message) to the lab system.
When the test is complete, the lab sends an ORU message back with the results in a standard format the EHR can parse and display.
Meanwhile, FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is the newer HL7 standard designed for the digital era and uses modular resources such as Patient, Observation, Condition, AllergyIntolerance, or MedicationRequest. This allows systems to read, write and send data queries especially in smaller, more flexible pieces.
Basic Application of HL7 Data Standards
HL7 provides a standard structure for clinical information through shared data models. However, uniformity depends on how consistently systems implement those models and the associated profiles.
An example would be a lab result setting where the potassium result keeps the same code, units, and reference range as it moves from the lab to the EHR. This lowers the risk of misinterpretation.
HL7 Standards Examples Across Care Settings
In primary care, systems use HL7 to send structured signals to specialists. In community care, it enables triggers for automated discharge notifications so when a patient has left the hospital, teams can easily coordinate follow-up and ongoing support.
Medication charts in consistent formats are sent to geriatricians to support safer prescribing. Meanwhile, real-time ADT helps clinicians in identifying patients quickly.
These examples show the role HL7 plays in keeping care coordinated with speed and precision.
As standards like HL7 continue to evolve, clinicians need tools that complement interoperable systems without adding new complexity.
Heidi aligns with HL7 in its objective even if it does not support HL7. It works to keep your documentation structured and workflows aligned.
Align with HL7 Standards and Work More Smoothly With Heidi
Heidi assists clinicians in creating high-quality notes and documentation with its technology having FHIR roots. These roots trace back to HL7.
Here’s how Heidi assists clinicians in making documentation smoother, simpler and safer for care teams:
- Built for safety and precision - Heidi works with the FHIR standard as part of the HL7 protocol but does not use HL7 interfaces. This helps standardize data structures and communication protocols.
- Designed with best-in-class security and compliance - All our API calls support 110 languages and are encrypted using TLS 1.2 or higher, providing a secure channel that protects every data exchange and meets the expectations of modern clinical systems.
- Trusted worldwide by clinicians - Heidi has partnered with major hospitals and health systems around the world, including Beth Israel Lahey Health in the USA, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in the UK, Monash Health in Australia, and the Yukon Government in Canada. This demonstrates that organizations trust Heidi because clinicians rely on it in practice.
You can find answers in our Heidi Compliance FAQs, which address common concerns. This transparency helps build trust and inculcates confidence among clinicians to use Heidi in their workflow.
FAQs About HL7 Standards
What is the ISO standard for HL7?
The ISO standards for HL7 are ISO/HL7 27931 (HL7 v2.5), ISO/HL7 27932 (Clinical Document Architecture - CDA), and ISO 10781 (EHR System Functional Model). There is no single ISO standard that straddles HL7. Instead, there are several joint ISO/HL7 standards that adapt different HL7 specifications.
What is the difference between HL7 and FHIR?
HL7 is the organization behind multiple healthcare data standards, effective for internal system-to-system messages. However, it relies on traditional technology to operate. On the other hand, FHIR is HL7’s modern standard that uses APIs to support real-time, universal data sharing.
What software uses HL7 standards?
Many healthcare applications such as EHRs, laboratory systems, pharmacy systems, and others use HL7 standards to exchange structured data. Healthcare software generally relies on HL7, including the newer FHIR standards, so that systems can interpret and use each other’s data accurately.
