CCR and CCD Interfaces

A successful EMR implementation in 2011 is more than simply selecting the right EMR or EHR software for your medical practice or hospital.  It requires consideration of many key factors - including patient portal integration using approved standards for Health Information Exchange (HIE). The most commonly used interface standards in health care are

• Health Level Seven, or HL7
• Continuity of Care Record, or CCR
• Continuity of Care Document, or CCD

Medical Web Experts has developed its Basic Patient Portal and Enterprise Patient Portal solutions using the CCD standard.  While most patient portals - like Google Health – support only the CCR format, Medical Web Experts' solutions support the importation and exportation of personal health records in both CCR and CCD formats.

Since 2003, Medical Web Experts has made an enormous impression in the EMR industry. Beyond their strong reputation in healthcare web design and physician marketing, founder and President John Deutsch has worked with multiple EMR software companies and maintains an active role in improving the EMR experience for physicians and hospitals.

What is the difference between the CCR and CCD interface standards?

The Continuity of Care Record, or CCR, is a standard developed by ASTM International - a global leader in the creation of consensus standards.

Because a CCR document is slightly limited in its ability to become a highly-scalable solution for interfacing two systems, the Continuity of Care Document (or CCD) was invented to link ASTM's CCR with the HL7's Clinical Documentation Architecture. Think of CCD as CCR on steroids.

CCD is a joint effort of HL7 and ASTM to foster interoperability of clinical data to allow physicians to send electronic medical information to other providers without loss of meaning, which will ultimately improve patient care.

Source: HL7

Continuity of Care Record (CCR)

The Continuity of Care Record (CCR) is a core data set of the most relevant administrative, demographic, and clinical information facts about a patient's healthcare, covering one or more healthcare encounters. It provides a means for one healthcare practitioner, system, or setting to aggregate all of the pertinent data about a patient and forward it to another practitioner, system, or setting to support the continuity of care. The primary use case for the CCR is to provide a snapshot in time containing the pertinent clinical, demographic, and administrative data for a specific patient. To ensure interchangeability of electronic CCRs, this specification specifies XML coding that is required when the CCR is created in a structured electronic format. Conditions of security and privacy for a CCR instance must be established in a way that allows only properly authenticated and authorized access to the CCR document instance or its elements. The CCR consists of three core components: the CCR Header, the CCR Body, and the CCR Footer.

Source: ASTM