Health Level 7 (HL7)
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 standards within and among healthcare organizations to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare delivery for the benefit of all.

Hospitals and other healthcare provider organizations typically have many different computer systems used for everything from billing records to patient tracking. All of these systems should communicate with each other (or "interface") when they receive new information but not all do so. HL7 specifies a number of flexible standards, guidelines, and methodologies by which various healthcare systems can do this. Such guidelines or data standards are a set of rules that allow information to be shared and processed in a uniform and consistent manner. These data standards are meant to allow healthcare organizations to easily share clinical information. Theoretically, this ability to exchange information should help to minimize the tendency for medical care to be geographically isolated and highly variable.

While HL7 properly refers to the standards organization, the term is frequently applied to the HL7 2.x messaging standard and the HL7 3.x data standard model.

Through support for a variety of communication protocols and message formats including HL7, Rhapsody Integration Engine acts as a mapping and translating mediator between incompatible systems. With a high performance message store and EDI components, Rhapsody is not only able to scale, but provides the tools to quickly map interfaces and meet new data configuration requirements of laboratory information systems.