Health Level 7 - Organization

Organization

HL7 is an international community of healthcare subject matter experts and information scientists collaborating to create standards for the exchange, management and integration of electronic healthcare information.

HL7 promotes the use of such informatics standards within and among healthcare organizations to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare information delivery for the benefit of all.

The HL7 community is organized in the form of a global organization (Health Level Seven, Inc.) and country-specific affiliate organizations:

• Health Level Seven, Inc. (HL7, Inc. ) is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
• HL7 affiliate organizations, not-for-profit organizations incorporated in local jurisdictions, exist in over 40 countries. The first affiliate organization was created in Germany in 1993.

The organizational structure of HL7 Inc. is as follows:

• The organization is managed by a Board of Directors, which comprises 10 elected positions and three appointed positions.
• The Chief Executive Officer (currently Charles Jaffe, MD, PhD) serves as an ex officio member of and reports to the Board of Directors. The Chief Technology Officer (currently John Quinn); and the Chief Operations Officer (currently Mark McDougall) report to the CEO and also serve as ex officio members on the Board of Directors.
• Members of HL7 are known collectively as "The Working Group". The Working Group is responsible for defining the HL7 standard protocol and is composed of Standing Administrative Committees and Working Groups.
  • Standing Administrative committees focus on organizational or promotional activities, such as Education, Implementation, Marketing, Outreach Committee for Clinical Research, Publishing and Process Improvement and Tooling.
  • Working groups are directly responsible for the content of the Standards, framing the actual language of the specifications.