The Chapters of the HL7 Standard

June 19th, 2007 by Dave Shaver

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The HL7 2.X message standard has multiple chapters that provide the general rules by which HL7 compliant applications should communicate. The chapter layout came about in the beginning of HL7 based on the committees structure used to create the standard.

In the early days of the HL7 standard - 2.3 and before - the standard itself was a bit inconsistent. That is, parts of the HL7 standard had typos or obvious conflicts. Later releases of HL7 cleaned up these problems and, generally, the chapters now agree with each other.

Outlined below is a list of the major chapters of the HL7 standard; this is helpful when someone says, “The PID segment is defined in Chapter Three.”

BTW, are you looking to gain an overview of HL7? If so, snag a free HL7 Reference Guide or attend a NeoTool-taught HL7 Training Class either on-line or in-person.

Chapter Name	Content
1 - Introduction	Overview of HL7.
2 - Control	Message Definitions, Interchange Protocols.
3 - Patient Administration	Admit, Discharge, Transfer, and Demographics.
4 - Order Entry	Orders for Clinical Services and Observations, Pharmacy, Dietary, and Supplies.
5 - Query	Rules applying to queries and to their responses.
6 - Financial Management	Patient Accounting and Charges.
7 - Observation Reporting	Observation Report Messages.
8 - Master Files	Health Care Application Master Files.
9 - Medical Records/Information Management	Document Management Services and Resources.
10 - Scheduling	Appointment Scheduling and Resources.
11 - Patient Referral	Primary Care Referral Messages.
12 - Patient Care	Problem-Oriented Records.
13 - Laboratory Automation	Equipment status, specimen status, equipment inventory, equipment comment, equipment response, equipment notification, equipment test code settings, equipment logs/service.
14 - Application Management	Application control-level requests, transmission of application management information.
15 - Personnel Management	Professional affiliations, educational details, language detail, practitioner organization unit, practitioner detail, staff identification.
Appendix A- Data Definition Tables	All HL7 and User-defined tables and their values.
Appendix B- Lower Layer Protocols	Protocols for lower layer of OSI model.
Appendix C-BNF Message Descriptions	BNF representations of abstract message definitions at the segment level.
Appendix D-Glossary	Glossary of terms.