Meaningful Use has elevated HL7’s Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) to become a critical standard for exchanging health data between Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. The presentations that are part of this panel illustrate how public health can engage with the EHR community through the use of CDA as well as how the public health community needs to prepare to use CDA.

Meaningful Use has elevated HL7’s Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) to become a critical standard for exchanging health data between Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems.  With much of the clinical data needed for public health reporting found inside EHRs, it makes sense for public health reporting to evolve to use the same standards that EHRs are adopting for other uses.  This session shows how the CDA standard is being used and is planned for use in public health reporting.

Presentations that are part of this panel illustrate the exchange from multiple perspectives.  From the EHR perspective:

• Engaging – Current use of CDA by the CDC National Healthcare Safety Network to engage with vendors to submit Healthcare Acquired Infection data to public health
• Empowering – Planned use of CDA for case reporting to empower EHR users to meaningfully reuse their data for public health reporting
• Evolving - HL7 is evolving the CDA standard to better support public health reporting requirement

The flip side of the focus on CDA is that public health needs to be prepared to deal with the standard. These presentations present the perspective from public health:

• Engage - Engage public health agencies in the world of CDA; show why it is to their benefit to look beyond v2.x
• Empower - Establish a framework to collectively determine requirements for tools to help Public Health agencies receive CDA from clinical settings and extract relevant data for use in PH surveillance systems; organize support for the creation and dissemination of such tools
• Evolve - Promote involvement by PH agencies in the federal rule-setting process and the standards development process, to ensure that, going forward, rules and standards meet the needs of public health

Together – The CDA Standard is helping Public Health and Clinical Partners to Engage, Empower and Evolve TOGETHER!