Rob Brull, Corepoint Health's product manager and instructor of our CDA & CCD First Steps training course, recently wrote a new white paper on everyone's favorite healthcare standard to hate – Consolidated CDAClinical Document Architecture (CDA) HL7 CDA uses XML for encoding of the documents and breaks down the document in generic, unnamed, and non-templated sections. Documents can include discharge summaries, progress notes, history and physical reports,... (C-CDA).
Download the free white paper.
Rob, who is an HL7 CDA-certified instructor, wanted to offer a deeper dive into the Meaningful Use-mandated standard because there is so much speculation about the standard throughout the industry due to a lack of real-world testing and multiple variations of C-CDAs produced by EHR vendors. Rob's deep dive into C-CDA, titled, "Untangling Consolidated CDA in Meaningful Use Stage 2," takes a historical approach to answer the three following questions:
- How is Consolidated CDA different from CDA?
- How is CCRContinuity of Care Record (CCR) is an XML-based standard for the movement of “documents” between clinical applications. Furthermore, it responds to the need to organize and make transportable a set of basic information about a patient’s health ... related to CCDContinuity of Care Document (CCD) The HL7 CCD is the result of a collaborative effort between the Health Level Seven and American Society for Testing Materials (ASTM) to “harmonize” the data format between ASTM’s Continuity of Care Record (CCR)... and CDA?
- Summary of Care, Patient Summary, Clinical Summary and Export Summary: What are they?
Meaningful Use requires eligible hospitals and professionals to meet objectives that utlilize C-CDA to pass Meaningful Use. Rob provides a full overview of the core objectives, which are required, and the list of menu objectives that both groups can chose from. The objectives include transfer of care (summary of care); view, download and transmit (patient summary); and clinical summary.
The key takeaway I took from the paper was that C-CDA is a huge improvement over the standards required in Meaningful Use Stage 1, but there is still much work that needs to be done to make this a true standard that can be more easily integrated and produced in a consistent format by all EHRElectronic Health Record (EHR), as defined in Defining Key Health Information Technology Terms (The National Alliance for Health Information Technology, April 28, 2008): An electronic record of health-related information on an individual that conform... systems.
I encourage everyone to download the free PDF, read it, and share it with others who you think would benefit. And, if you have any additional questions, feel free to tweet them to Rob.
Tags: Healthcare Interoperability, HL7, Meaningful Use HiTech