Tutorial: How nurses can use HL7? What can Nurses do for HL7?

William GOOSSEN¹ GAYE DOLIN²

This tutorial “How nurses can use HL7”, provides an overview of Health Level Seven standards from a professional perspective. It explains what HL7 standards exist and how these assist nursing in EHR development and use, and in data communication efforts for several purposes. Standards are a prerequisite to functionality of healthcare information systems and the support of various care processes. In particular, where continuity of care and reporting of care quality are involved, nurses have a pivotal role. Such efforts usually involve more than one system, and more than one organization, hence, these require data communication. It is HL7’s mission to create the best and most widely used information standards in healthcare. Nurses have been increasingly involved in the Health Level Seven (HL7) Work Groups and the standards development processes over the past ten years. It makes sense addressing specifically the HL7 use by nurses, since they are the largest group of healthcare providers in the world. The ultimate goal of this tutorial is that the more engaged nurses are in the standards specifications and development process, the more functional their information systems and data exchanges will be.

This tutorial will cover:

• Relevant types of standards for nursing and the position of HL7 in this
• The HL7 standards development organization,
• An understanding of HL7 version 3 standards, in particular Care Record and Clinical Document Architecture
• The Electronic Health Record / Personal Health Record standards
• How to handle nursing knowledge and vocabulary in the suite of HL7 standards
• How these standards are and may be used in nursing care
• How nurses can participate in the standards development process.

¹ Co-chair Health Level Seven Work Group Patient Care.

^2. Member HL7 Structured Documents Working Group.

Date: September 10, 2012

Location: Hyatt Regency Baltimore on the Inner Harbor, Baltimore, MD, USA

This will take place at the 26th HL7 Annual Plenary & Working Group Meeting, September 9-14, 2012

Inquiries about this tutorial can be made to wgoossen@results4care.nl

More information on the event and registration: http://www.hl7.org/events/wgm092012/