HL7 C-CDA® Rendering Tool Winners
Together with the ONC, HL7 issued an open challenge to developers earlier this year to create a better tool for rendering CCDA summary records. This was purposeful and timely because with the 2015 Edition Final Rule ONC doubled down on its focus of displaying the received summary record in an efficient and effective manner for clinicians. They added emphasis on directly displaying specific sections of the summary record, preference for the order of the sections, and the initial quantity of sections to be displayed.
More impactful to many developers, they explicitly forbid the use of the default CDA.xls style sheet provided by HL7 to satisfy the display requirement. Thus, developers need to find more complete solutions than just the default CDA.xls style sheet which was probably the most common solution employed with 2014 Edition products.
The CCDA challenge was intended to help show developers ways of doing this, and one of the guidelines was to comply with the 2015 Edition rules on summary care record display. A first and second place winner of this rendering tool challenge were just announced. Their solutions and source code are made available through Github as open source projects.
I have checked them both out, and I think both are excellent. I strongly encourage any and all developers to look at them, either as inspiration or using some of the code in your product.
