QuickLabel NiceWatch - Manual (Page 14)

NiceWatch Enterprise
14
NiceWatch User Guide
HL7
HL7 (Health Level 7) is global messaging standard for healthcare applications and
providers. The messaging interface enables healthcare, insurance and supplier institutions
and software applications to communicate with each other in a common language.
NiceWatch Enterprise Business Connector communicates with HL7 v2.5 compliant
software applications. The functionality is available for the management of outgoing HL7
messages and a HL7 filter is available for parsing incoming HL7 messages.
The HL7 standard has two main releases. The version 2.5 release is a linear, delimited
data structured file that uses headers in the beginning of each segment to clearly separate
the segments. The version 3 release of the standard is an XML data structured file. This
release fixes the limitations of the v2 standard by allowing stronger type declaration of
the fields and offering a more standardized structure of the result file sent in a message.
To begin, only the version 2.5 of the standard is supported in the software. According to
our research, over 90% of the applications available today support version 2.5 of the HL7
standard only. Because of this, it is predicted that it will take 5 years or more to convert
many of these version 2.5 deployments to version 3 XML. There are plans to enhance the
software in the future to be HL7 version 3 compliant. Current version 3 customers can be
serviced by using the XML filter in the software.
The overall system is one where the printer network is managed though the NiceWatch
Enterprise Business Connector and the client stations are managed by the hospital
Healthcare Information System (HIS), Laboratory Information System (LIS) or Pharmacy
Information System (PIS).