Editing Health Level 7 (section)

{{Short description|Data sharing standards}}
{{About|the family of standards|the organization that created them|Health Level Seven International}}

'''Health Level Seven''', abbreviated to '''HL7''', is a range of global standards for the transfer of clinical and administrative health data between applications with the aim to improve patient outcomes and health system performance. The HL7 standards focus on the application layer, which is "layer 7" in the [[OSI model|Open Systems Interconnection model]]. The standards are produced by [[Health Level Seven International]], an international [[standards organization]], and are adopted by other standards-issuing bodies such as [[ANSI|American National Standards Institute]] and [[ISO|International Organization for Standardization]]. There are a range of primary standards that are commonly used across the industry, as well as secondary standards which are less frequently adopted.