•President and Chief Informatics Scientist, Hi3 Solutions •Active member of HL7 since September 1991 •Co-chair of the HL7 Modeling and Methodology Workgroup •HL7 Milestones: •Chaired the HL7 Education Workgroup from 1996 to 2010. •Received the HL7 volunteer of the year award in 1997 •Served on the HL7 Board of Directors from 2000 to 2005 •Received the HL7 Fellowship award in 2012

The Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) is HL7's specification for standards-based exchange of clinical documents. CDA is based on the concept of scalable, incremental interoperability and uses eXtensible Markup Language (XML), the HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM) and controlled terminologies to enable the exchange of clinical documents with processable semantics.
This tutorial presents an overview of the CDA, outlining the business case for CDA, its primary design principles, capabilities and relationship to its growing family of implementation guides. The presentation will identify and discuss the capabilities and features of each of the three basic components of CDA: the document header, document body and clinical entries. It will also outline the current strategies employed to generate and validate both CDA documents and documents based on CDA implementation guides. The presentation will wrap up with an examination of how CDA has been deployed in a real-world setting.