Health Level Seven International® (HL7®)

Health Level Seven International is a standards-developing organization providing a framework and international standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information (including clinical and administrative data) to support clinical practice and the management, delivery, and evaluation of health services. These standards for transfer of data between health care software applications focus on the application layer, which is "layer 7" in the Open Systems Interconnection model (OSI model), a conceptual model characterizing and standardizing the communication functions of a telecommunication or computing system without regard to its underlying internal structure and technology.