As many clinicians are frustrated with the usability of Health Level 7’s consolidated clinical document architecture (C-CDA) standards, HL7 and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) are sponsoring a C-CDA Rendering Tool Challenge to encourage the development of HL7 tools to better manage and view clinical data.
The C-CDA is an XML-based document markup standard specifying the structure and semantics of documents, imaging reports and discharge summaries, for example, exchanged among providers and patients. Often, there is an overabundance of data rendered by the electronic health record (EHR) system and providers and clinical staff have to page and sort through all of the data to find the essential and relevant clinical information that triggered the clinical event for which the C-CDA document was created, according to a HL7 release about the challenge.
“A viewer that makes relevant information easier to view would save clinicians’ time and ensure they do not miss the information they need to make decisions,” the HL7 release stated.
The C-CDA rendering tool project challenges participants to create a viewer that “enables clinicians to effectively review the patient data from C-CDA documents that is most clinically relevant to them,” HL7 said. “The viewer should provide functionality to allow a clinician to view the data so they can quickly assess the status and state of the patient efficiently. The viewer needs to be easy to use and present requested data quickly and clearly, whether through section-based view preferences, filter functions, intelligent sorting or some other functionality.”
The contest is offering $15,000 for first place awards and $5,000 for second place awards. Submissions are eligible through May 31, with a winner to be announced in September during the HL7’s 30th Annual Plenary Meeting. More information can be found here.
