ONC Releases Beta Scorecard for C-CDA Documents

A new tool released by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is being offered to providers and developers to help them identify and resolve interoperability issues involving Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA) documents in their HIT systems. ONC’s new scorecard provides two scores for submitted C-CDA documents—one reflects whether a document meets the requirements of the 2015 Edition Health IT Certification for Transitions of Care (pass/fail), and the other provides a grade (A+, A-, B+, B-, C and D) based on a set of enhanced interoperability rules developed by Health Level Seven (HL7).

According to ONC, higher scores and grades indicate that “information is coded with appropriate structure and semantics and hence has a better chance of interoperating with disparate systems.” C-CDA was produced and developed through the joint efforts of ONC and HL7, among others, to create a set of harmonized CDA templates. CDA is a base standard which provides a common architecture, coding, semantic framework and markup language for the creation of electronic clinical documents.

The best practices and quantitative scoring criteria have been developed by HL7. The scorecard is based on the work completed by the ONC-funded Substitutable Medical Applications and Reusable Technologies (SMART), which leverages HL7’s emerging Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards to make it as easy as possible for app developers to get to data and for EHR vendors to implement a common application programming interface (API)...