CDA Generation and Integration for Health Information Exchange Based on Cloud Computing System

Successful deployment of Electronic Health Record helps improve patient safety and quality of care, but it has the prerequisite of interoperability between Health Information Exchange at different hospitals. The Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) developed by HL7 is a core document standard to ensure such interoperability, and propagation of this document format is critical for interoperability. Unfortunately, hospitals are reluctant to adopt interoperable HIS due to its deployment cost except for in a handful countries. A problem arises even when more hospitals start using the CDA document format because the data scattered in different documents are hard to manage. In this paper, we describe our CDA document generation and integration Open API service based on cloud computing, through which hospitals are enabled to conveniently generate CDA documents without having to purchase proprietary software. Our CDA document integration system integrates multiple CDA documents per patient into a single CDA document and physicians and patients can browse the clinical data in chronological order. Our system of CDA document generation and integration is based on cloud computing and the service is offered in Open API. Developers using different platforms thus can use our system to enhance interoperability.