EHR Integration
The Continuity of Care Document (CCD) is a joint effort of HL7 International and ASTM.
CCD fosters interoperability of clinical data by allowing physicians to send electronic medical information to other providers without loss of meaning and enabling improvement of patient care.
CCD is an implementation guide for sharing Continuity of Care Record (CCR) patient summary data using the HL7 Version 3 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), Release 2.
CCD establishes a rich set of templates representing the typical sections of a summary record, and expresses these templates as constraints on CDA.
These same templates for vital signs, family history, plan of care, and so on, can then be reused in other CDA document types, establishing interoperability across a wide range of clinical use cases.
The CCD is meant to be used by:
- Healthcare Providers
- Healthcare IT Vendors
- Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Personal Health Record (PHR) Systems
Benefits of the CCD include:
- Allows physicians to send electronic medical information to other providers without loss of meaning.
- Provides a “snapshot in time,” constraining a summary of the pertinent clinical, demographic, and administrative data for a specific patient.
- Supports the ability to represent professional society recommendations, national clinical practice guidelines, standardized data sets, etc.
The CCD is intended as an alternate implementation to the one specified in ASTM ADJE2369 for those institutions or organizations committed to implementation of the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture. It represents a complete implementation of CCR, combining the best of HL7 technologies with the richness of CCRs clinical data representation, and does not disrupt the existing data flows in payer, provider or pharmacy organizations. The CCD is an XML-based standard and was recognized in 2008 by the US Secretary of Health and Human Services for this use. It has been named in US Regulations for exchange of clinical information.
The CCDA is based on components of two standard formats that were previously required for certified EHRs: the CCR and the CCD. This format was chosen as the standard for communicating the summary of care since it can accommodate all data elements that providers give their patients after office visits. HL7 created a single implementation guide for the Consolidated CDA, which was released in December 2011 in an effort to reduce ambiguity and eliminate conflicts in documentation. The Consolidated CDA solution encompasses a library of reusable CDA templates, setting the stage for streamlined development and quicker implementation.
