HL7 Services Aware Interoperability Framework

This article documents the effort of the Health Level Seven(HL7) community and specifically the former 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 Canonical Definition (SAIF-CD) provides consistency between all 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 archi