HL7 Announces C-CDA Rendering Tool Challenge Winners

Health Level Seven International (HL7), the global authority for interoperability in HIT with members in 55 countries, recently announced the winners of the HL7 Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA) Rendering Tool Challenge.

The first place winner of the HL7 C-CDA Rendering Tool Challenge is Bryn Lewis, PhD, a principal software development consultant at Intelsoft in Melbourne, Australia. The award-winning tool, Intelsoft C-CDA Viewer, is an easy-to-use viewer of complex C-CDA documents available in any web browser and can be downloaded at https://github.com/brynlewis/C-CDA_Viewer. Interested parties can watch a demo of the tool at www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi3VvNJPVaA. Lewis will be recognized at HL7's 30th Annual Plenary on September 19 in Baltimore, Maryland.

The second place winner is Will Tesch, CEO of HealthLX Inc in Grafton, Wisconsin. His tool, Patient Insight, is a Continuity of Care Document (CCD) viewer that can harmonize the interpretation of disparate system data about patient encounters. Interested parties may download the tool at https://github.com/healthlx/HL7Challenge.git and view a demo of the tool at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8wYnJF9pco.

The idea for the challenge arose from the recognition that clinicians are frustrated with the usability of C-CDA documents. Currently, an overabundance of data is rendered and sent to providers, requiring them to spend time sorting through data that is not relevant to their immediate needs. HL7 and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) addressed this need by issuing a tool challenge to develop a viewer that could enable clinicians to select the C-CDA document data most clinically relevant to them and display such data in an order they prefer.  

The tool was required to meet the following criteria:

• Render the data as specified by the clinician thereby allowing him/her to quickly review the current health and needs of the patient

• Present requested data quickly and clearly through section-based view preferences (ordering), filter functions, intelligent sorting or some other functionality

"The ability to view selected portions of multiple C-CDA documents is a crucial step toward improving patient care," says Charles Jaffe, MD, PhD, CEO of HL7 International. "Clinicians will find opportunities to leverage these tools, reducing the burden of reviewing complex sets of documents. We applaud the collaboration with ONC, which sponsored the challenge. In the end, it is our patients who will benefit by improved access to their critical health data."

For more information about the HL7 C-CDA Rendering Tool Challenge, visit www.HL7.org/events/toolingchallenge.cfm.

Source: Health Level Seven International