As technology continues to advance, there is an increasing demand for health informatics standards to guide the development of messaging technologies to be used for data interchange within the healthcare environment. The focus of this work is messaging to enable interoperability.

Of particular interest is the Health Level Seven (HL7) protocol, which is a widely used Standard that enables healthcare applications to share clinical and administrative data between different information systems and healthcare organisations.

The IT-014-06 Messaging and Communication working groups have developed and published several Australian Implementation Standards for HL7 in the areas of Patient Administration, Diagnostics, Clinical Referral & Discharge, Prescription and Immunization.

Additionally, the Message Usage Model Handbook (developed by subcommittee IT-014-06) provides guidance on the implementation of healthcare messaging and identifies the way existing messaging standards should be used within the healthcare sector.