HL7 Health Service Reference Architecture (HL7-HSRA)

HL7’s work relating to services and service standards has historically focused on developing specifications for individual services themselves. This included their functionality, inputs, outputs, expected behavior, exception handling, and so on. What has been missing is the guidance expressing how those services fit together, how they are intended to be used, and the documentation of essential patterns that are demonstrated solution approaches to solving identified business problems.

The use of these services in healthcare organizations is predicated upon an understanding of composite solutions that include different services that interact with one another (e.g., choreographies and/or orchestrations). It is when composite services are included within a services architecture that they begin to realize their true benefit, and this is the intent of the HL7-HSRA. HL7-HSRA will support the process of architectural design with a map of building blocks and solution patterns based on existing HL7 Standards.

For those organizations interested in achieving true “business” interoperability and not just data sharing, work such as HSRA is essential to realizing the consistency necessary for to achieve eHealth interoperability, and ultimately support for health interoperability.

Addressing what has been a void in guidance to support business-to-business health needs manifests as increased design and planning barriers adversely affecting HL7-based architectures. This can lead to unintended, insufficient, or incomplete solutions based upon HL7 work products, falling short of their potential to adequately meet needs, particularly for medium and large-scale environments or institutions.

This project takes into consideration the needs of architects and CIOs to undertake a fully pervasive, sound, balanced and cost effective HL7 Service design for Enterprise interoperability. Within HL7, we anticipate HSRA as having a positive impact in fostering alignment among workgroups, serving to identify existing gaps and to drive cross-product alignment.