Representatives from several industry groups aired their grievances about the new clinical document exchange standards at a recent meeting of the Health IT Policy Committee's Standards and Implementation workgroup.
Use of the Consolidated-Clinical Document Architecture is required to meet the clinical data exchange requirements of meaningful use stage 2. However, stakeholders have claimed the standard is immature and complicates data exchange efforts.
"No single C-CDA document template contains all of the data requirements to sufficiently meet meaningful use stage 2 compliance," said Matt Reid, a senior health IT consultant with the American Medical Association, explaining physicians were struggling to successfully share information and extract and use data from transmitted documents.
The problem, as explained by Practice Fusion Senior Product Advisor Emily Richmond, is that the current standards allow for significant variability among vendors that results in varying interpretations when developed and configured by different providers. "Greater interoperability would require stricter and more clearly defined standards with less flexibility in interpretation," she said.
Micky Tripathi, president and CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, echoed the sentiments, calling the C-CDA "an unwieldy container," but saw hope in overcoming the issues through both clearer standards and implementation guides for providers.
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