electronic Journal of Health Informatics www.eJHI.net Special Issue for IHIC 2013 2013; Vol <Vol>(<Issue>): <Identifier> Leveraging ebXML for HL7 V3 Message Transportation Hasan Ali Khattak 1 , Maqbool Hussain 2 , Muhammad Afzal 2 , Raihan Ur Rasool 3 , and Farooq Ahmad 4 1 DEE - Politecnico di Bari, Via E. Orabona 4, Bari, Italy 2 UC Lab, Kyung Hee University, South Korea 3 University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA 4 Department of Computer Science, King Faisal University, KSA Abstract This paper presents a feasible solution for HL7 v3 Message transportation using ebXML standard over SMTP for asynchronous communications. The Healthcare systems aim to provide healthcare related capabilities and several attempts have been made to standardize the communication among all the healthcare organizations. Lack of interoperability has raised the need for standards with which these Healthcare Information Systems can interact and work together. Healthcare standards such as HL7 provide unified infrastructure for interoperability and communications. This work proposes simple and affordable method for HL7 v3 based message transportation using ebXML, which is XML framework for B2B communications. Keywords: HL7; Messaging; XML; ebXML 1 Introduction Healthcare informatics has been considered one of the major research areas and among much needed service infrastructures by healthcare domain experts. With increasing number of Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) developed and deployed around the globe by different organizations, the problem of interoperability has arose. Health Level 7 (HL7) [1] is one of such attempts to standardize the clinical standards and healthcare messaging formats that loosely define the ideal representation of clinical information and together the standards are meant to provide a framework in which the data should be exchanged. Every hospital, laboratory, clinic and care facility is unique in its practices and have different demands which is the reason HL7 is sometimes dubbed as “non-standard standard” [2]. There are many entities ranging from clinics who need to create clinical reports to be exchanged among the applications and healthcare providers, different Governments and Medical informaticists who are involved in research on healthcare logic and clinical knowledge creation and transportation. These stake holders seek to generate and exploit a Clinical Ontology – a hierarchical structure representing a data model, a vocabulary to define the terminologies and a workflow on how things can be done.