Imagine opening up your favorite word processor and pulling in your favorite template – it constrains what you can do, but it helps ensure consistency across the documents you produce. Imagine you draw your template from a community library, where you benefit from the development work of other contributors. Imagine further that you can pull multiple small templates into your document – one to define the overall document structure, one to define the detailed content for one of the sections, etc.

Imagine that your favorite word processor produces CDA documents and that templates in the community library are vetted by clinical experts through an open process, and stored in a format that allows them to be used by any word processor – so that generated CDA documents are constrained by the templates selected, in order to ensure consistency.

Imagine if you could do all this in a way that creates minimal disruption to clinical workflow while putting you on an incremental path to semantic interoperability, a path that leads to Meaningful Use.

You’d be imagining “templated CDA”.

Speaker: Bob Dolin, MD, Chair of HL7 and President & CMO, Lantana Consulting Group

www.himssconference.org