WHY STANDARDS?
Did you know HL7 offers certification and proficiency exams for its healthcare information technology standards?
Are you HL7 certified?
HL7 offers certification in its primary standards for health information technology including Version 2 (V2), Version 3 (V3), Clinical Document Architecture (CDA®) and HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®). The testing is designed to help professionals achieve industry-recognized levels of proficiency and expertise.
A little history
Studying HL7 history, our standards went from a plain text, replication/messaging-based paradigm in the 1980s to the current, Internet 2.0, resource-based paradigm. We also created document-based standards such as the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA®) Release 2 and SOA based standards like Common Terminology Services (CTS).
These 30 years of history gave us a good insight on what we need as standards users and developers.
What do we need as standards users?
People who implement and use standards want open access to standards and implementation guides. They need understandable and short specifications, off-the-shelf tools, reference implementations, friendly representation of information (instances), easy access to vocabularies, automated validation of instances, affordable education, a formal extension mechanism.
Finally, they need examples, examples, and more examples. They need lots of examples!
What do we need as standards developers?
Standards developers have different needs. They want easy profiling with graphical user interfaces (GUI) and the ability to reuse templates. They also want one-click, automated publishing, validation and QA profiles, validation of instances, global profile registry, and ease of vocabulary binding.