What does this mean to public health?Ĭlinical documents have become a key strategy in promoting and using electronic information to support patient care.
The purpose of an electronic document, however, is to maintain the integrity of the data represented in it at the moment in time it was produced.
Clinical documents typically contain data about just one patient at a time.ĭata stored in a document-centered file can be extracted and processed since the underlying electronic data is structured and machine-readable. An additional “meta” database is maintained which has entries about each document to facilitate their retrieval (like information about the patient whose clinical data is in the document, but not the clinical data itself). But rather than process the data into a database, the clinical document is usually stored intact in a document repository (like an electronic filing cabinet). In this case, data extracted from a participating system is formed into a clinical document and sent to the recipient. The second approach is document-centered: Public health usually receives data-centered files for public health reporting and most public health agencies are skilled at processing and absorbing these types of files. Data-centered files can contain information about just one patient or about many patients depending on the use cases and systems involved. This has been a common mode of data interoperability for many years. In this approach data is extracted from a participating system, transformed into a data file (e.g., fixed length or delimited file) and sent to the recipient who processes the data into a database. There are two approaches to preparing and processing information that originates in one system and is destined for another. How do clinical documents compare to other data formats?įor years health IT professionals have been enabling interoperability between systems, both within organizations and between organizations.
Health care cda file format registration#
At the point of care, they reduce hassle to patient in completing new provider registration materials (that awful clipboard), allow physicians to receive critical health data at transfer of care, and improve the quality of care through complete and timely information.May be easier to generate than other forms of e-data.They can provide patients with an accurate, readable record of some or all of their medical record.They can improve the speed and accuracy of data absorption into other systems.They reduce cost in reproducing and transporting paper records.To provide a human-readable format for clinical data that is consistent with the machine-readable format within the same document.