HL7 International is an ANSI accredited standards development organization (SDO) that has been active for over 25 years. It has more than 35 country affiliates across the globe. hData was first presented to a wider audience within HL7 as the September 2009 meeting in Atlanta, GA. Since then, hData has first been evalauted as a HL7 research project within the HL7 ITS working group. The research project culminated in a "For Comment" ballot in January 2011. After a carefull analysis, HL7 decided to standardize the hData Record Format (which defines a unified packaging mechanism and metadata model) under the leadership of the HL7 SOA working group, while the hData RESTful Transport is being standardized through the HSSP Collaboration between HL7 and the Object Management Group (OMG) Healthcare Domain Task Force (DTF).

The HL7 Architecture Board decided that the SOA Working Group would be best suited to manage the hData projects at HL7. Other interested partied include the ITS Working Group, Modeling and Methodology, and the Security Working Group. hData has its own wiki page on the HL7 wiki.

Within OMG, the hData RESTful Transport specification has been submitted for consideration as an OMG specification using the (fast-track) RFC process.

The hData specifications can be seen as a realization of the HL7/OMG SOA RLUS model. Through the HCP mechanism, they interact also with the HL7 Clinical Domain Analysis Community, who need to determine what content is appropriate to be included in a given hData Content Profile. The HCP also requires business justifications and behavioral modeling (where appropriate).

The following diagram illustrates the relationship between hData and other HL7 activities:

Github project