HL7 Services Aware Interoperability Framework

This article documents the effort of the Health Level Seven(HL7) community and specifically the HL7 Architecture Board (ArB) to develop an interoperability framework that would support services, messages, and Clinical Document Architecture(CDA) ISO 10871.

HL7 provides a framework and standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information.

SAIF Overview

The HL7 Services-Aware Interoperability Framework (SAIF) provides consistency between all HL7 artifacts, and enables a standardized approach to Enterprise Architecture (EA) development and implementation, and a way to measure the consistency.

SAIF is a way of thinking about producing specifications that explicitly describe the governance, conformance, compliance, and behavioral semantics that are needed to achieve computable semantic working interoperability. The intended information transmission technology might use a messaging, document exchange, or services approach.

SAIF is the framework that is required to rationalize interoperability of standards. SAIF is an architecture for achieving interoperability, but it is not a whole-solution design for enterprise architecture management.

SAIF Documents

SAIF consists of several documents:

• Introduction (INTRO)
• Enterprise Conformance and Compliance Framework (ECCF)
• Behavioral Framework (BF)
• Governance Framework (GF)
• Information Framework (IF)
• Implementation Guides (IG)

Further details may be found on the Health Level Seven(HL7) wiki .

Current Documents may be found on the Health Level Seven(HL7) gforge repository .

Introduction

The SAIF Introduction and Overview describes the general constructs that frame the SAIF. SAIF represents a synthesis of best practices and concepts from multiple architectural frameworks. This introduction to SAIF goes into a lot of technical depth and assumes you are already familiar with architectural standards and the HL7 organization.

Enterprise Conformance and Compliance Framework

The major goal of the ECCF is enabling working interoperability between different users, organizations, and systems. The ECCF is manifest in a structure called the ECCF specification stack (SS). This structure identifies, defines, organizes, and relates a set of artifacts that collectively specify the relevant semantics of a software component specification or other system-of- interest. In summary, the ECCF SS provides an organizational framework in which inter-related artifacts are sorted by content – for example, business rules, information constructors, behavioral contracts, and level-of-abstraction.

Behavioral Framework

The BF provides a set of constructs for defining the behavioral semantics of specifications, which enable working interoperability. As a result, the focus of the BF is accountability – a description of “who does what when.” Accountability describes the perspective of the various technology components that are involved in a particular instance or scenario designed to achieve Working Interoperability. The BF is technology-neutral and, therefore, can be used within model-driven specification stacks, such as the ECCF.

Governance Framework

This document describes the motivation for, the structure, content and utilization of the GF. The ECCF and BF are discussed in detail in separate documents, and are mentioned in the course of this document only when necessary to either contextualize or logically link GF content to the larger context of the Services Aware Interoperability Framework.

Information Framework

The Information Framework (IF) is a SAIF-compliant recasting of existing HL7 expertise regarding the specification of static semantics. The Information Framework will draw on the information available from the following sources:

• Storyboards
• Domain Analysis Models (DAM)
• Reference Information Model (RIM) ISO21731
• Vocabulary concepts
• HL7 Core Principles

Implementation Guide

HL7 will be producing implementation guides to help architects and developers integrate SAIF into their projects.