I recently dialed in for an eHealth Summit session on administrative simplification hosted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.  A panel of members from the Administrative Simplification Group spoke about the convergence of administrative and clinical information transactions.  The panel suggested that it didn’t make sense to combine and analyze administrative and clinical data when assessing cost efficiency. Another key recommendation was to repurpose data that exists to lower the provider reporting burden. 

Someone in the audience asked when private sector payers will begin using Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA) for pre-authorization – a time consuming activity for providers.  It was noted by the audience member that the private sector could easily identify data required for pre-authorization and specify it using a C-CDA format. 

We like the idea! CDA is the base standard for building electronic clinical documents, and CDA templates provide the “building blocks” for creating these documents. C-CDA contains a library of harmonized CDA templates for nine different healthcare document types. We believe C-CDA can provide the requisite information to automate the pre-authorization process, providing immense efficiencies for both providers and payers. 

Agenda and speaker details are available here: http://2013ehealthsummitwebinar.eventbrite.com/.

If you’d like to learn more about C-CDA, join us for our 9th CDA Academy workshop October 14-18, in Nashville at the Vanderbilt Center for Better Health.  We offer four tracks covering interoperability strategy as well as hands on training of the specs required for MU – Clinical Document Architecture, Consolidated CDA and the Quality Reporting standards (QRDA and eMeasure).  Register online before the Sept. 22 early bird deadline at www.cdaacademy.com.