The American National Standards Institute has fully approved seven specifications of standards body Health Level Seven's messaging and clinical documentation. The specifications are guidelines for improving current standards or creating new ones.

The specifications include definitions for:

• Messages and related elements for scheduling of appointments;
  
  
• Messages and corresponding elements for claims authorization, verification, adjudication and payment;
  
  
• The reference information model for the entire set of standards;
  
  
• Adapting message specifications to support other designs and standards;
  
  
• Shared messages;
  
  
• XML data types; and
  
  
• Data types for other languages used by system designers