Continuity of Care Document for Hospital Management Systems: an Implementation Perspective

Implementation of Electronic Health Record (EHR) has become essential towards delivery of standardized healthcare services, particularly in developing nations. Legacy hospital management systems developed earlier lack compliance to EHR guidelines and required standards. In this paper, we focus on a specific aspect of EHR, the Continuity of Care Document (CCD), which is a standard format used for ubiquitous migration of patient information and medical records across hospital management systems. We discuss the challenges involved in implementation of CCD for legacy systems and present case studies on such a system with a view to understand the gap and effort required in such an endeavour. We also introduce an SDK and web API for assisting organizations to easily extending the existing Hospital Information Systems to generate CCD. This would be useful for developers of healthcare solutions in understanding and practically implementing the same.