CDA: Clinical Document Architecture

Description

The HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA®) is a primary standard of Health Level Seven (HL7) and used millions of times each day for the exchange of patient summaries and other medical documents.

CDA is a document markup standard that specifies the structure and semantics of clinical documents for the purpose of exchange between patients, healthcare providers, and other stakeholders. It defines a clinical document as having the following six characteristics:

  1. Persistence
  2. Stewardship
  3. Potential for authentication
  4. Context
  5. Wholeness
  6. Human readability

The CDA Standard

All of the following are equivalent representations of CDA R2.0. The top row is the Normative version.

Description Link
CDA R2.0 Online Navigation (Normative)
This makes the original CDA R2.0 publication web accessible.
Current Version
CDA R2.0 in Structure Definition Format (Informative)
This supports CDA implementation guides authored using StructureDefinition. It includes all SDTC extensions that are approved by HL7.
Current Version
CDA R2.0 Extension Schema
This is the CDA schema with all SDTC extensions that are approved by HL7.
Releases Page
CDA R2.0 Stylesheet
This is an informative stylesheet based on XSLT 1.0 which offers an example of how to render a CDA document.
Releases Page
CDA R2.0
This is the original 2010 CDA R2.0 publication available via download only.
June 2010


Interactive Graphical Map of CDA (click to navigate)



logo cda
Graphical Map of CDA (CDA Refined Message Information Model, R-MIM, Diagram)


Additional Resources


Visit the HL7 CDA Dashboard on Confluence for up-to-date information about educational and other resources supporting the CDA Community.