Hiatus in Global HL7 CDA Challenge
Well it is now several months since I established the Global HL7 Challenge and the deadline for the first part of the challenge has just passed with no respondents.
I can only put this down to a global lack of capability to implement HL7 CDA based solutions beyond the simple HTML style of document rendering.
Given that the next HL7 International Working Group Meeting is to be held in Sydney in January 2011, and that this meeting includes a 3 day master class in CDA, I have decided to extend the deadline for both parts of the challenge by 6 months. This will give an opportunity for those who undertake this course to turn their newfound knowledge and skills into something of potential value to the global health informatics community.
It also gives potential sponsors the opportunity to contribute to this important test of the capability of HL7 CDA to underpin Australia’s e-health interoperability future. It would be a very cost-effective way for organisations such as NEHTA to assess the viability of CDA-based discharge summaries and referrals as foundation components of Australia’s forthcoming PCEHR.
I suspect that one of the reasons for the lack of participants, thus far, is that the constituent tasks do not reflect the most common approaches to implementing CDA. Many will be generating both CDA section text and coded entries from an application-layer data model, rather than attempting to produce XHTML directly from coded entries, or vica versa.