Question: NEHTA CDA & GP referrals

Jul 22, 2014

Question

Is there any example of NEHTA compliant CDA document that I can look at from a perspective of a GP referral form ( http://nhv.org.au/uploads/cms/ files/VIC%20-%20GP%20Referral% 20(March%202013).rtf )? Is there a tool that can be used to navigate and generate the CDA from a HL7 v2 message?

Answer

There’s been a lot of discussion over the last decade or so about creating a CDA document for these kind of referral forms. I saw a pretty near complete set of functional requirements at one point. But for various reasons, the project to build this has got any funding, either as a NEHTA project, or a standards Australia project (it’s actually been on the IT-14-6-6 project list for a number of years, mostly with my name on it).

So right now, there’s no NEHTA compliant document. As a matter of fact, I don’t know of anything quite that like that from any of the national programs, though no doubt one of my readers will - please comment if you do. There is a project investigating this in the US National Program (S&I framework( but they’re not using CDA.

On the other part of the question, no, unfortunately not. NEHTA provides both C# and java libraries that implement the NEHTA described CDA documents, but it’s an exercise left to the implementer to convert from a v2 message to a CDA document. That’s primarily because there’s so much variability between v2 messages that there’s no safe way to write a single converter

I tried to do that with just AS 4700.2 messages, which are much more constrained than the general case, and it wasn’t really successful; the PITUS project is working on the fundamental alignment needed to get ti right in the future.