Health Level 7 and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT kicked off a challenge addressing the consolidated clinical document architecture (C-CDA) standard and providers' frustrations with it.
The C-CDA is an XML-based document markup standard specifying the structure and semantics of documents—imaging reports, discharge summaries—exchanged among providers and patients.
Making C-CDAs human readable is called rendering—a chief requirement of the documents is that all relevant clinical content be present and renderable in human readable form. But, oftentimes an "overabundance of data is rendered by the electronic health records system based on C-CDA documents that are being sent/received," according to HL7.
Clinical staff then have to go through all the data to pinpoint the relevant information that triggered the clinical event for which the C-CDA document was created.
"EHR vendors, for numerous and admirable reasons, typically render more information than clinicians want, sometimes including the patient's entire medical history," according to HL7. "A viewer that makes relevant information easier to view would save clinicians' time and insure they do not miss the information they need to make decisions."
The C-CDA Rendering Tool Challenger aims to find a viewer that lets clinicians effectively review the patient data that's most clinically relevant to them from C-CDA documents.
The viewer should enable rendering of the data as specified by the user, and allow clinicians to quickly review the current health and needs of a patient, according to the contests' guidelines, and should provide functionality to allow healthcare professionals to quickly assess the status and state of the patient. Ease of use is key, with the aim being quick and clear presentation of requested data "whether through section-based view preferences (ordering), filter functions, intelligent sorting, or some other functionality," according to HL7.
Submissions are eligible until May 31, with a winner to be announced in September.
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.