Like IHE, the ELINCS profile constrains the generic HL7 standard to a specific set of use cases.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) legislation specified HL7 versions 2.3.1 and 2.5.1, and the HL7 Continuity of Care Document (CCD), as the healthcare standards to meet certain certification requirements.
HL7 CDA (Clinical Document Architecture) also has a subset of mechanisms similar to (and intended to be compatible with) DICOM for referencing image-related spatial coordinates as observations; it allows for a circle, ellipse, polyline or point to be defined as integer pixel-relative coordinates referencing an external multi-media image object, which may be of a consumer rather than medical image format (e.g., a GIF, PNG or JPEG).
Therefore, the goal of RPS is to create an HL7 XML message standard for submitting information to regulatory authorities.