On the Interest of Using HL7 CDA Release 2 for the Exchange of Annotated Medical Documents

During the last past years, cooperatives medical practices in healthcare networks have emerged and evolved drastically. Within these networks, healthcare professionals take care of patients, according to their degree of expertise, in contact with the others members for heaviest or simplest cases. An ubiquitous element in these medical documents is annotation. The issue of considering these annotations in computerized medical documents exchanged within healthcare networks is fundamental to the integrity and quality of future medical information systems. In this paper we highlight, based on the study of concrete medical information and their annotations, the fact that these documents belong to the peculiar category of "documents for action" and we also emphasize the potential of the HL7 CDA standard to represent and exchange these annotations in such networks.