Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture: 5 Best Practices for Health IT Teams

Healthcare providers are under pressure to improve the quality and accuracy of care while reducing costs. A big part of this is improving information sharing between clinicians and facilities. Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (CCDA) is a way to standardize how healthcare information is shared electronically. This blog post will discuss five best practices for implementing CCDA.

What is Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture

Before diving into the best practices for implementing CCDA, it is essential first to understand what CCDA is and how it can benefit your organization. CCDA is a document markup standard or group of implementation guides that specifies the structure and semantics of clinical documents for exchange. CCDA documents share patient information between different health IT systems, including electronic health records (EHRs), clinical decision support systems, and health information exchanges. CCDA documents are created using Extensible Markup Language (XML), a standard for encoding data in a machine-readable format. XML allows different software applications to exchange data consistently, regardless of the underlying platform or software application. CCDA intentionally contains a broad set of use cases and does not…