Standards evolve to address business needs of the affected constituents.
The gradual introduction of information technology into healthcare has caused providers and vendors to cooperate on healthcare data communications standards. IEEE 1073 addresses the needs of patient connected bedside medical devices. HL7 addressed the needs of batch based processes such as orders, results, admission, discharge, and transfer. This paper addresses the different business requirements for, and relationship between, IEEE 1073 and HL7. The major cause of differences between IEEE 1073 and HL7 is the wide disparity in use cases.