Implementation of HL7 to client-server hospital information system (HIS) in the University of Tokyo Hospital.

In developing a large-scale Hospital Information System (HIS), a client-server architecture has been gaining in popularity. It is important to introduce a standard message protocol that is independent both on the database structure and on the vender's proprietary platform. We introduced Health Level Seven (HL7) to our hospital information system. From our experiences, although we had to modify the original HL7 specifications in order to introduce the protocol to a client-server HIS especially in the area of order entry and record-oriented query, it was found that HL7 can be adopted in a client-server HIS.