Upgrades to electronic health record (EHR) systems scheduled to be introduced in the USA in 2014 will advance document interoperability between care providers. Specifically, the second stage of the federal incentive program for EHR adoption, known as Meaningful Use, requires use of the Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA) for document exchange. In an effort to examine and improve C-CDA based exchange, the SMART (Substitutable Medical Applications and Reusable Technology) C-CDA Collaborative brought together a group of certified EHR and other health information technology vendors to examine the machine-readable content of collected samples for semantic correctness and consistency. This article outlines the finding.

SMART Platforms Project is an ONC-funded research project at Harvard Medical School/Boston Children’s Hospital. SMART and Lantana Consulting Group collaborated with EMR/HIE vendors to perform a detailed review of vendors’ Meaningful Use Stage 2 Consolidated-CDA documents. More at www.smartplatforms.org/2013/07/introducing-the-smart-c-cda-collaborative/.