Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)

Currently, hospital cancer registries transmit a cancer abstract report to state central cancer registries in a North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR) standard ASCII flat file format, as defined in Volume II, Data Standards and Data Dictionary. This format has worked well over the years; however, national health information technology (IT) initiatives have adopted the Health Level Seven (HL7) message format as a standard way to transmit health data. NAACCR would like to explore alternative message formats that will be consistent with national health IT initiatives.

CDC's NPCR, in collaboration with vendors, providers, partners, and standard setters associated with the NAACCR, will develop an implementation guide (IG) that uses the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) for cancer registry abstract reporting.

The purpose of this project is to develop, test, and deploy an HL7 CDA IG for the transmission of data from hospitals to central cancer registries, and assess the usability of this format for the transmission of the cancer abstract. NPCR has contracted with CDA technical experts to help develop

1. An implementation guide.
2. A strawman report.
3. Software that transforms a file from ASCII flat file format to CDA and vice versa.