C-CDA
Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture
C-CDA is the HL7 XML standard for clinical documents such as the Continuity of Care Document, discharge summary, and referral note.
C-CDA (Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture) is the HL7 standard for structured clinical documents. Built on HL7 CDA R2.1, it consolidates document types like the CCD (Continuity of Care Document), discharge summary, referral note, and progress note into a single, harmonized template library.
C-CDA documents are XML, combining human-readable narrative with machine-readable structured entries. For years they were the primary vehicle for meaningful-use document exchange and transitions of care, and enormous volumes of C-CDA still move across HIEs and TEFCA today.
The modern challenge is moving between document-centric C-CDA and resource-centric FHIR: a C-CDA maps to FHIR Composition and DocumentReference plus the discrete resources (Condition, MedicationStatement, AllergyIntolerance) its entries contain.
How this relates to Health1st
Health1st's Document Intelligence Agent converts C-CDA ↔ FHIR — parsing structured entries into discrete resources and generating conformant documents — and can extract structure from unstructured narrative using clinical NLP.
Related terms
FHIR is HL7's modern, web-native standard for exchanging healthcare data as modular JSON/XML resources over RESTful APIs.
US Core is the HL7 implementation guide that constrains FHIR resources into the specific profiles US regulation requires, binding them to USCDI data elements.
TEFCA is the US framework that connects health data networks nationwide through a common legal and technical agreement, operationalized by QHINs.
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