David and Michael

Thank you both for the excellent clarification.

Best Regards
Vishwa


On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 4:48 AM, David Kibbe <[email protected]> wrote:

> Dear Colleagues:  As Chair of ASTM E31 Technical Committee on Healthcare
> Informatics, the technical committee within ASTM that has developed and
> maintained the Continuity of Care Record, CCR, standard, specification
> E2369-05, I want to thank Michael Jahn for his explanation below of the
> differences between the CCR standard and the HL7 CDA CCD.  His description
> is basically correct.
>
> Let me add that I expect both the CCR standard and the CDA CCD will persist
> in the marketplace of IT for some time, for a number of reasons.   The CCR
> standard is fairly plain vanilla XML tagging of summary health content, and
> can stand by itself as both a content and messaging standard for web
> services that require structured and encoded data elements.  In a number of
> instances around the world, developers have launched into the CDA CCD only
> to find it too complex, and have then used the CCR standard to "learn the
> ropes" so to speak, after which the translation to the CDA CCD as necessary
> has been much easier and smoother.  There are XSLTs and other methods for
> this translation available.  The content of the CDA CCD is based upon, some
> would say borrowed from, the CCR standard.  Which is fine.  Translation
> between the two standards is highly desirable at this early stage of health
> data exchange using XML.  And the CCR has helped standardize the expected
> contents.
>
> The CDA CCD is a much more complex construct, referential not only to the
> conventions of the CDA but also to the RIM, maintained by HL7 as a model for
> all health data.  It is quite complex, to say the least.   But many of the
> large HIS and IT firms are comfortable with the CDA CCD, and they may
> already use the CDA for transport of other types of documents that are not
> structured, e.g. discharge summaries.  In turn, there are now people and
> entities using the CCR standard as a new and very simple data model,
> primarily applicable for ambulatory care and outpatient uses.
>
> My own personal opinion, while not very relevant here, or at least no more
> so than anyone else's, is that simplicity and ease of use is related to high
> levels of adoption for any standard.  The same is true for familiarity.
>  Imposing complexity on any business or industry is normally not a very good
> idea, and tends to be self-defeating if your goal is to help the standard
> along a route to general utility.
>
> The CCR standard itself is probably more complicated than it needs to be
> for 80% of all web services and computable health data exchange of its
> elements.  It's not surprising that Google Health and others have utilized
> only a small subset of the CCR's data objects and elements, a strong
> indication of the success of a sparse information model and very typical of
> Google's approach to the world in general.
>
> We are in the process of evaluating when the CCR standard Version 2.0
> should go to ballot, at which time a number of mostly minor changes will be
> made based entirely on the recommendations coming from the industry groups
> that are using the standard in some production capacity.  In other words,
> the CCR standard is already responding to its users in a very practical way.
>   If you would like to be involved in that effort, please contact me and
> Steven Waldren, MD.
>
> One final note:  no XML schema is going to solve all of the problems
> involved in structured health data exchange.  The vocabularies and coding
> nightmare = ambiguity, is one such problem that the CCR standard can't fix,
> although its users and developers can help to bring some consensus about the
> issues of importance with coding systems, e.g. cost of use.
>
> Kind regards, DCK
>
>
> David C. Kibbe, MD MBA
> Senior Advisor, American Academy of Family Physicians
> Chair, ASTM International  E31Technical Committee on Healthcare Informatics
> Principal, The Kibbe Group LLC
> ___________
>
> 913-205-7968 mobile
> ___________
> [email protected]
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>
>
>  On Nov 9, 2009, at 5:34 PM, Michael Jahn wrote:
>
> Hi Vhrao,
>
> ASTM manages CCR.
>
> Google Health supports a SMALL SUBSET of the CCR specification - Google
> Health does not support anything related to CDA, CCD or HL7 - and one might
> be thankful of that as it is quite complex and in the domain of EMR system
> vendors who sell things starting at $250,000.00
>
> Hl7.org <http://hl7.org/> manages CDA
>
> http://www.hl7.org/
>
> CCD (Continuity of Care Document), an ANSI standard approved in 2007, is
> built on CDA elements by using a detailed set of constraints.
>
> HL7’s Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) stores or moves clinical
> documents between medical systems. Documents are things like discharge
> summaries, progress notes, history and physical reports, prior lab results,
> etc. The CDA uses XML for encoding of the documents and breaks down the
> document in generic, unnamed, and non-templated sections.
>
> HL7’s CDA defines a very generic structure for delivering “any document”
> between systems. What is missing in the CDA standard proper is a listing of
> the sections of that document. That is, a template of the expected sections
> that will appear in a given type of document. For example, on a history and
> physical document, sections could be named Current Medications, Prior
> Immunizations, Social History, etc.
>
> Ignoring the political or technical motivation, an independent group at the
> ASTM was formed and worked to define an XML standard for moving documents
> between systems.
>
> That is what CCR is (some think "was" but I am not going toi get into that
> here...
>
> Initially, this standard was unrelated to HL7’s CDA standard. It is fair to
> say the standards competed for mind share and each expressed a different
> integration philosophy.
>
> In later efforts, the two standards groups agreed to effectively make the
> standards compatible with each other. The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)
> between HL7 and ASTM says that they will “harmonize” the two competing
> standards. That’s a fancy way of saying they will play nicely.
>
> Some like to describe the CCR as a specialization of the CDA. That is, the
> CCR provides a template of the expected sections that will be provided in
> CDA format. This CCR “content profile” is a tightly controlled list of
> document sections answering the “What major bits of data will be sent?”
> question. The CDA, then, is the structure of how the document will be
> formatted in XML.
>
> There are many many issues...
>
> Some of us are trying to play nice in this complex sandbox with PDF
>
> http://www.myhealthcarestuff.com/cdapdf.html
>
> hope this helps
>
> Michael Jahn
> Jahn & Associates
> PDF Conversion Specialist
> 1824 North Garvin Avenue
> Simi Valley
> California 93065
> Office: (805) 527 8130
> Cell: (805) 217 6741
> Email: [email protected]
> Skype: michaelejahn
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/michaelejahn
> Blog: http://michaelejahn.blogspot.com/
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 1:49 PM, vhrao <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>> I have been reading up on CCR and CCD. I understand that CCR is a
>> snapshot medical record at a given point of time and CCD is history of
>> medical records. If this is true then in order to send comprehensive
>> mdeical data to providers we need CCD. Is this correct?
>> I tried to look up a CCD specificaiton and I could not find it.
>>
>> How does Google health handle history data?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
> >
>


-- 
Best Regards

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