HL7 Ambassador Series: The Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)

Keith W. Boone, Co-Chair, HL7 Structured Documents Work Group; Interoperability Architect, GE Healthcare; Co-Chair, IHE Patient Care Coordination Technical Committee, Member, ANSI/HITSP Consumer Empowerment, Care Delivery and Population Health Technical Committees. The Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) is a specification for the exchange of electronic clinical documents. It can contain coded data and narrative and is compatible with the electronic health record. This presentation describes the benefits of CDA, its basic structure, and provides global examples of its use. It also overviews the new work at HL7 pertaining to CDAs.