EHR
During the last few years I’ve had some key conversations with many hospital executives and healthcare IT professionals, among them: CEOs, CIOs, CMIOs, COOs, architects, strategists, etc. Most of the conversations have been around the topic of how to get the data required for being or becoming an effective ACO, or simply a provider highly conscientious of the well-being of their cared ones even beyond the walls of their facilities. Some of these providers weren’t aware of the ACO conversations since they didn’t participate in the CMS roundtables but they understood that the healthcare model had to drastically change.
CCD is an acronym that stands for “Continuity of Care Document”. The CCD is a file that uses Extensible Markup Language (XML) format, which could have one of 3 different structure levels. I will explain the various structure levels in Part III of this blog series. A CCD contains patient related information that could be electronically exchanged between healthcare providers, as well as, shared with the patients themselves.
The CCD template, derived from the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) Continuity of Care Record template or ASTM E2369-05 Standard Specification, or simply stated the CCR. The CCD is constrained by the HL7 (Health Level Seven) Clinical Document Architecture (CDA). The CDA adheres to the HL7 V3.0 Reference Information Model or RIM.
In the first post of this 2 part blog we explored the big challenges with the demands that the ARRA HITECH and other compliance and regulatory impositions have impacted Healthcare IT: HIPAA’s Version 5010 conversion, ICD-10 migrations, Meaningful Use of EHRs and their Attestation and Accountable Care Organizations. We also briefly touched the popular topic of the imminent end of the world in 2012 according to the Mayan calendar prediction.
If you read carefully you would have noticed that my predictions, well, they have some small glitches now and then, or you may call them “bugs” due to my software developer background. So at the end of this blog we’ll have to revisit the end of the world prediction. Sorry folks.
Healthcare providers and eligible primary physician practices are undergoing analysis paralysis because of all the government impositions on improving healthcare with the following list of complex problems to solve: HIPAA’s Version 5010 conversion, ICD-10 migrations, Meaningful Use (MU) of EHRs and Attestation , Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) , Data Aggregation and mining for successful Quality Measurement Reporting and Performance Improvement Requirements, CPOE implementations, CDA and the CCD template based document generation for sharing patient information between health providers, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Private Health Information (PHI) in the Cloud, internal demand for emerging technologies, the Mayan prediction of the end of the world, Et cetera, Et cetera, Et cetera.
