January 2016 HL7 Workgroup Meeting

HL7 International working group meetings (WGMs) are held three times per year at varying locations. These WGMs serve two important purposes: They give the HL7 International work groups a chance to meet face-to-face to work on the standards as well as the opportunity to network with industry leaders from around the world; They provide an invaluable educational resource for the healthcare IT community.

HL7 International working group meetings (WGMs) are held three times per year at varying locations. These WGMs serve two important purposes:

• They give the HL7 International work groups a chance to meet face-to-face to work on the standards as well as the opportunity to network with industry leaders from around the world.
• They provide an invaluable educational resource for the healthcare IT community.

Standards Development

More than 40 HL7 work groups are dedicated to specialized areas of interest such as Mobile Health and Electronic Health Records. These work groups are directly responsible for the content of the standards and spend much of their time at the working group meetings hard at work on standards development. Attending a work group meeting can be a great way to keep up-to-date on what is happening in a particular area, and everyone attending an HL7 working group meeting is invited to attend any of the work group meetings.

Following are some of the key themes:

• Focus on Interoperability and the maturity level of your products
• FHIR
• Make your products implementable—defined down to the data element—so that implementations can be consistent and easy to do
• Provide or define the tooling or toolkits needed in implementation so those working with the HL7 products don’t have to sort this out
• Develop Application Program Interfaces requirements
• Define HL7 so it is easy to understand regardless of the audience
• Assure that HL7 is the place to go for healthcare IT development
• Be the ‘go-to’ healthcare standards development body

Educational opportunities

Numerous educational opportunities will be offered at this WGM. Sessions will cover a full range of HL7-specific topics such as Version 2.x Implementation, Version 3, and the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA®), Fast Healthcare Interoperability Standards (FHIR®), among others. Educational sessions also include industry topics such as Meaningful Use in the US, Electronic Health Records, and Vocabulary Terminology.