Archive for the ‘CCD’ Category

As the healthcare industry moves towards increased sharing of patient data, the challenge has become how to share and store that data between systems without losing the true clinical meaning of the diagnosis. In a conversational way, a paragraph of words by the clinician can most effectively present the full meaning of the diagnosis. But [...]

In the Healthcare Interoperability Glossary, interoperability is defined as “The ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged.” Even with the industry’s current focus on health information exchange and electronic health records, a truly interoperable healthcare system can at times seem as likely [...]

Last month when it was announced that all health insurance carriers in the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program (FEHBP) were to add Blue Button functionality, I was excited. Anything that promotes access to health information for patients and makes it easier for them to update new providers is a good thing. The amount of positive [...]

Several questions can arise when considering whether to parse the data of a CCD document from a remote facility and merge it into the local EHR. HIEs are spurring increased emphasis on the use of CCD documents to exchange information among facilities, so it would be ideal to have consistent practices regarding the merging of [...]

The IHE Connectathon event for 2012 was held in Chicago last week. Connectathon allows vendors from healthcare IT to test their ability to support IHE profiles, which are critical to standardizing communications across HIEs, ACOs, and across regions. Here are a few observations from my first-time participation at Connectathon: Industry Buy-in It was apparent from [...]

CCR … I’m sure there are days for those who work in Health IT and with the various health standards  when it would be a nice, mental break if those three letters represented what many recognize it as – Creedence Clearwater Revival. We could all take it easy like Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski, roll down [...]

The primary characteristic of a CDA document is that it must be readable by humans. The CDA specification states that, “human readability guarantees that a receiver of a CDA document can algorithmically display the clinical content of the note on a standard Web browser.” This requirement means that a clinician or patient can take a [...]

An interesting implementation question was recently submitted to the HL7 list serve for structured documents.  The question centered around the correct way to express “none” in a CDA instance.  In a general sense, “none” can have two meanings: A positive assertion. For example, a patient positively asserts no known allergies, no active medications, etc. An [...]

The need for interoperability is readily apparent in the healthcare industry. But what does interoperability mean with regards to richness of data? The CDA document is defined with three different levels of interoperability: Level 1: Includes the CDA Header plus a body consisting of an unstructured blob, such as PDF, DOC, or even a scanned [...]

As the product manager of Corepoint Integration Engine, it has been an interesting learning experience from the time the decision was made to pursue the EHR modular certification to the time certification was achieved. And, before beginning the certification trek, time was spent trying to uncover the real story of whether an integration engine even [...]