Application of Portable CDA for Secure Clinical-document Exchange

Health Level Seven (HL7) organization published the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) for exchanging documents among heterogeneous systems and improving medical quality based on the design method in CDA. In practice, although the HL7 organization tried to make medical messages exchangeable, it is still hard to exchange medical messages. There are many issues when two hospitals want to exchange clinical documents, such as patient privacy, network security, budget, and the strategies of the hospital. In this article, we propose a method for the exchange and sharing of clinical documents in an offline model based on the CDA—the Portable CDA. This allows the physician to retrieve the patient’s medical record stored in a portal device, but not through the Internet in real time. The security and privacy of CDA data will also be considered.