Australian implementation of the American National Standard, health level seven.

In response to requests from our health informatics community, Standards Australia has formed a working group to define and implement an Australian version of the Health Level Seven standard for admission, discharge, and transfer of patients in public and private hospitals. Health Level Seven is the only comprehensive standard for interhospital messages that currently exists internationally. Adopting Health Level Seven nationally and implementing it in accordance with the Australian standard could reduce the cost and time needed to design and build interfaces for hospital computing systems.