This page contains background information and documentation about the HL7 Terminology. The material contained herein has been drawn from the Standards and other documents published by HL7 and the Vocablary WorkGroup.

Introductory Information

The HL7 Terminology viewable here rendered as web pages represents a new way for HL7 to publish its terminology and vocabulary, which hitherto has been largely contained within various Standards and Guides in the different HL7 Product families. These web pages represent an attempt to gather all of the information that the HL7 community needs in order to implement systems and interfaces, based on the published HL7 Standards, in one place and eailly accessible. The information on these pages will be updated frequently as requested and agreed changes and enhancemments are made.

Common (Unified) Characteristics

HL7 has adopted a common overall notional architecture for terminology across all of its product families. This architecture is focussed on representing all terminology in Code Systems and Value Sets. Work has been done to adapt all related vocabulary and termminology designs across the HL7 product famillies to these common structures. See the secitons below for discussions of how this has been done for the different product families. The common form used by these new designs are based on FHIR CodeSystem and ValueSet resources, and includes a number of extensions and special properties to correctly capture, in a machine-processable way, all of the older information in the HL7 product family terminology structures. This mapping has been done in order to facilitate maintenance and publishing (on these pages) of all of the HL7 Terminology, and to eanble the content to be unified where appropriate in the future.

External Terminology

There are hundreds of terminologies and code sets used to support Healthcare systems, persistence, and communication in use in the world, maintained and published by many organizations outside of HL7, and across many many nations. Virtually all implementations based on HL7 Standards include one or more of these terminologies in the implementation guidance and conformance rules, both those publshed outside of HL7, and those defined, maintained, and published by HL7. For the convenience of implementers and users, certain of these have been explicitly identified over the years by the HIT community, and the technical components for their unambiguous identification and use have been published in the HL7 Standards and Guides. In addtion, a few of these have had their content encapsulated in the designs of HL7 terminology structues to facilitate their use by the HL7 communinity. These have been imported to this new publishing form for the convenience of the community, and the terms of compliancit is hoped that it be used in a common way across all of the HL7 product families that need to reference or use these external terminologies.

Design Details Of The Persisted Terminology Structures

Version Control and Display

A Word About Implementation Guides

HL7 Version 2 Product Family Terminology Representation

HL7 Version 3 Product Family Terminology Representaation

HL7 CDA Product Family Terminology Representation

HL7 FHIR Product Family Terminology Representation