What does it cover?

• The primary purpose of HL7 is to facilitate communication in the healthcare setting by providing standards.
• The Standard should support exchanges among systems implemented in a wide variety of technical environments.
• Its implementation should be practical in a wide variety of programming languages and operating systems.
• It should support different communication environments, ranging from networked to less complete environments such as serial communication or file drops.
• Immediate transfer of single transactions should be supported along with batched transactions.
• The standard must be flexible enough to handle the custom needs of a facility (i.e. custom Z segments).
• Lastly, the standard must be able to grow as new needs are uncovered, making the standard backwards compatible.

What is not covered?

• The HL7 standard does not specify what, if any, encryption method should be used between systems. This wiki covers some common approaches to securely transmitting HL7.
• It also does not attempt to define accountability. Any audit trails and acknowledgments should be discussed between partnering systems.
• While HL7 makes significant use of time and date stamped data, it does not support a set of transactions to ensure the synchronization of clocks.
• HL7 does not make any attempt to provide coordination of database access and record locking.