The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has requested officials to test pilot a tool, called C-CDA Scorecard. Reports say that the tool is designed to grade consolidated clinical document architecture documents (C-CDA) in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the clinical messaging systems.
The C-CDA Scorecard tool ranks healthcare providers on their clinical messages in three different ways. In one of the grading standards, the tool gives a pass-fail grade to the providers based on their clinical messages, and checks whether it meets the standards set by ONC’s 2015 Edition Health IT Certification criteria for clinical messages, which are used in hospital discharge summary and other transitions of care.
Today, almost all hospitals and many other office-based physicians use EHR. A major shift was witnessed among the feds, who were under the EHR incentive payment program of $35 billion towards “interoperability,” which means that many individuals are using these systems to send and receive data of their patients in order to cut down the cost and to improve the quality of care.
Another grade set by the C-CDA Scorecard gives clinical messages grade from A to F. The grade A is set as the highest score and the score gradually decreases as it moves down the table and reaches F, which is the lowest score in the table. According to a summary published on the web page of the tool, the letter grades set by C-CDA Scorecard also corresponds to numerical scores up to up to 100 as measured against “enhanced interoperability rules developed by HL7.”
According to ONC, “A higher score (grade) means that information is coded with appropriate structure and semantics and hence has a better chance of interoperating with disparate systems.” In addition to that, the C-CDA Scorecard also assigns numeric scores and individual letter grades for the components parts of the tool and gives an insight on how effectively the tool conveys data about medications, vital signs, and immunizations.
Experts believe that the tool will help individuals, who highlight “areas of improvement which can be made today to move the needle forward,” while implementing health IT systems.