Active Learning of the HL7 Medical Standard

Health Level Seven (HL7®) is a standard for exchanging information between medical information systems. It is widely deployed and covers the exchange of information in several functional domains. It is very important and crucial to achieve interoperability in healthcare. HL7 competences are needed by all professionals touching information technology in healthcare. However, learning the standard has always been long and difficult due to its large breadth as well as to large and complex documentation. In this paper, we describe an innovative active learning approach based on solving problems from real clinical scenarios to learn the HL7 standard, quickly. We present the clinical scenarios used to achieve learning. For each scenario, we describe and discuss the learning objectives, clinical problem, clinical data, scaffolding introduction to the standard, software used, and the work required from the students. We present and discuss the results obtained by implementing the proposed approach during several semesters as part of a graduate course. Our proposed method has proven that HL7 can be learned quickly. We were successful in enabling students of different backgrounds to gain confidence and get familiar with a complex healthcare standard without the need for any software development skill.