Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Health Level Seven International (HL7) announced the winners of a challenge to develop HL7 tools to better manage and view clinical data.
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) announced back in January a C-CDA Rendering Tool Challenge to address these issues.
HL7 announced that Bryn Lewis, Ph.D., a principal software development consultant at Intelsoft in Melbourne, Australia, was the first place winner for developing an easy-to-use viewer of complex C-CDA documents available in any web browser, according to a HL7 press release about the challenge winders.
The second place winner of the challenge is Will Tesch, CEO of Grafton, Wis.-based HealthLX Inc. Tesch developed a tool, Patient Insight, that is a continuity of care document (CCD) viewer that can harmonize the interpretation of disparate system data about patient encounters.
HL7 provides links on its website to download the tools as well as links to view online demos of the tools.
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.
For the challenge, ONC and HL7 tasked developers with developing 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,” Charles Jaffe, M.D., CEO of HL7 International, said. “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.”