The Development of a National Approach to CDA: Successes, Challenges and Lessons Learned from Australia

Authors

Patricia Williams
Sarah Gaunt
Grahame Grieve
Vincent McCauley
Hugh Leslie

Document Type

Journal Article

Faculty

Faculty of Computing, Health and Science

School

School of Computer and Security Science / eHealth Research Group

RAS ID

14072

Comments

Williams, P. A., Gaunt, S., Grieve, G., McCauley, V., & Leslie, H. (2012). The Development of a National Approach to CDA: Successes, Challenges and Lessons Learned from Australia. European Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 8(3), 37-44. Available here

Abstract

Background: Australia has been in the process of designing and implementing a national ehealth system for a number of years. A core component of this design has been the selection of HL7's CDA as the basis of the Australian EHR. This incorporates CDA into both the shared Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record and for document exchange point-to-point. Objectives: CDA was chosen partly for its ability to address issues of governance and consistency in a national environment that does not have definitive oversight or a single decision making body. Methods: Developing long and complex implementation guides has been assisted by good desi11n of a 'super-schema' to include the Australian extensions, together with a framework for extensive conformance checking. Australia .has created a multi-level conform ante framework which currently supports a mainly level2 CDA architecture yet provides a transition pathway to future full interoperability. Results: One area of contention around the Australian solution, however, is debate over content presentation and data content using CDA. The Australian implementation has had considerable debate around the technical .and governance infrastructure for controlling the rendering of the documents. Other challenges have arisen in the selection of transport standards, sourcing of CDA expertise and in relation to the need for local extensions to CDA. Local extensions to CDA have been modelled using the HL7 development paradigm (based on the HL7 RIM) as permitted by the CDA standard, and submitted for inclusion in HL7 COA Release 3. Conclusions: This paper illustrates the Australian approach to the development of CDA for the National EHR and ehealth point-to-point communications, and provides an insight for other countries considering similar implementations.

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