HL7 is defining data exchange standards with “focus on the electronic interchange of clinical, financial and administrative information among independent healthcare-oriented computer systems”.

Besides the definition of data standards, HL7 defines message wrappers that define how to exchange HL7-XML documents between computer systems.  These “wrappers” will not be in the scope of this document.  Please refer to HL7 “Version 3 Guide, HL7 Messaging Components, V3 message wrappers and Infrastructure” for more details about this.

For more information, please refer to the official HL7 website.