What is CCDA?
Consolidated CDA

Founded in 1987, HL7 International is the nonprofit organization that develops and maintains these standards. Today, HL7 standards are used in healthcare facilities across 55+ countries, making it one of the most widely adopted frameworks in health IT.

In simple terms: HL7 defines the format and structure of messages that healthcare systems use to share patient data.

HL7 works by defining a common language — a messaging format — that different healthcare systems can use to send and receive data. Think of it like a universal translator sitting between two systems that otherwise wouldn’t understand each other.

When a patient is admitted to a hospital, for example, the admissions system generates an HL7 message and sends it to the EHR, the billing system, the lab system, and the pharmacy — all at the same time. Each system reads the same structured message and updates its own records accordingly.

This happens through a series of HL7 message types, each designed for a specific event:

Each message is broken into segments (like rows in a table) and fields (like columns), separated by specific delimiters. A receiving system knows exactly where to find each piece of data based on the position defined by the HL7 standard.

HL7 is not a single standard — it is a family of standards. The most important ones you’ll encounter in healthcare IT are:

Implementing HL7 in a healthcare environment is rarely straightforward. Here are the key considerations:

At Taction, our engineering team has deep hands-on experience building and maintaining HL7 integrations across a wide range of healthcare settings — from community hospitals to large health systems, payers, and digital health platforms.

What we do:

Whether you’re building a new integration from scratch, troubleshooting a broken interface, or planning a broader interoperability strategy, our team can help you move faster with fewer surprises.