Editing Health Level 7 (section)

== Purpose ==
Health organizations typically have many different computer systems used to process different patient administration or clinical tasks, such as billing, medication management, patient tracking, and documentation. All of these systems should communicate, or "interface", with each other when they receive new information or when they wish to retrieve information. [[Health Level Seven International|HL7 International]] specifies a number of flexible standards, guidelines, and methodologies by which these healthcare systems can communicate with each other. The standards allow for easier 'interoperability' of healthcare data as it is shared and processed uniformly and consistently by the different systems. This allows clinical and non-clinical data to be shared more easily, theoretically improving patient care and health system performance.<ref>{{cite book|author=Joel Rodrigues|title=Health Information Systems: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications, Volume 1|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WnBJsRtfVbYC&pg=PR39|publisher=IGI Global|isbn=978-1-60566-988-5|year=2010|page=xxxix}}</ref>