The HL7 Clinical Document Architecture

TLDR

Health Level 7 (HL7) develops health‑care messaging and clinical document standards, with the CDA Framework becoming an ANSI‑approved standard in 2000. The article outlines the CDA’s objectives and provides a technical overview of the standard. The CDA is defined by these document standards.

Abstract

Many people know of Health Level 7 (HL7) as an organization that creates health care messaging standards. Health Level 7 is also developing standards for the representation of clinical documents (such as discharge summaries and progress notes). These document standards make up the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA). The HL7 CDA Framework, release 1.0, became an ANSI-approved HL7 standard in November 2000. This article presents the approach and objectives of the CDA, along with a technical overview of the standard.