Rene Spronk on “Where Is HL7 Deployed or Used Across the World?”

May 3rd, 2007 by Dave Shaver

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Posted in Healthcare Integration, HL7 Messaging

Healthcare Integration Insights on the HL7 Standard: Rene Spronk from Ringholm is a former co-chair of the HL7 Marketing committee and a very active participant within the HL7 community. He offered up his view on “where in the world are the HL7 users” in response to my posting earlier this week about who uses HL7.

Given that I deeply appreciate both Rene’s HL7 work and his opinion, I wanted to place his entire response in a new posting so it would not get lost in the RSS shuffle.

It is true that this mainly depends on what one decides to count. The HL7 Marketing committee established that 30% of the global HL7 membership is located in the US, and about 45% in Europe. Which doesn’t necessarily mean the distribution of implementations is the same.

The 80% figure in terms of users (organizations that use HL7 interfaces) looks way too high to me. For example: Any application sold by a global vendor with an HQ in Europe or the US will ship with an HL7 interface, wherever it’s being sold.

Do we have any figures on the use of HL7 in Italy, Greece, Saudi Arabia or Russia? Nope. In my estimation most of the “knowledgeable users” of the HL7 standards are located in the US, although other countries are picking up fast - notably so when there is a NHII initiative based on CDA or HL7 v3.

I’ll offer up some useful response/comments once I recover from my jet lag.