Health Level 7 (HL7) is an organization seeking to provide universal stan- dards for the exchange of healthcare information. In a document entitled 'HL7 Version 3 Standard: Data Types', the HL7 organization advances descriptions of data types recom- mended for use as identifiers. We will argue that the descriptions supplied provide insuffi- cient guidance as to what exactly the entities are which these data types uniquely identify. Are they real things, such as persons or pieces of equipment? Or are they representations of such real things in information artifacts? We here outline the problems faced by HL7 in pro- viding answers to such questions, problems which arise because of the lack of anything like a coherent ontology in the HL7 standard, and we make some recommendations for future im- provements.
[1]
Werner Ceusters,et al.
Towards a Reference Terminology for Ontology Research and Development in the Biomedical Domain
,
2006,
KR-MED.
[2]
Charles N. Mead,et al.
The HL7 Reference Information Model Under Scrutiny
,
2006,
MIE.
[3]
Barry Smith,et al.
Beyond Concepts: Ontology as Reality Representation
,
2004
.
[4]
Werner Ceusters,et al.
Strategies for referent tracking in electronic health records
,
2006,
J. Biomed. Informatics.
[5]
Werner Ceusters,et al.
HL7 RIM: An Incoherent Standard
,
2006,
MIE.