A hospital needs a number of software applications to efficiently and accurately manage daily functions. A dedicated application system is available to cater to the needs of individual functional entity, such as Patient Registration, Billing, Nursing and Bed Management, Order Management, Pharmacy, and Laboratory. These systems are provided by different vendors and are typically built using different technologies. HL7 plays the vital role of providing mechanism for interconnecting these systems. Each individual application entity has the capability of exchanging information using HL7 messages. They often maintain the same information in different forms and use different codes to represent common values. This requires an integration engine that has HL7 capabilities.

This diagram illustrates a typical integration scenario. Data is exchanged over different interfaces to ensure a connected and functional application system environment.