Formal methods impact on ANSI standard HL7/IM - filling gaps in MSC theory

Health level seven (HL7) is an ANSI standard that provides a comprehensive framework for electronic health information. The most-widely used HL7 specification is called infrastructure management, which facilitates health-care applications to exchange key sets of clinical and administrative data. This paper results from a cooperation between the authors of the HL7 standard and academics who have actively participated in an HL7 technical committee. The challenge taken is to apply formal methods to a standard in creation, which can be incomplete and subject to change. Based on this contribution to HL7, we address some gaps in the current theory on message sequence chart with respect to deferred behavior and to non-local choice.