Health Level 7 and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT kicked off a new challenge that aims to alleviate provider frustrations with the usability of HL7's consolidated clinical document architecture standard. 

The C-CDA is s an XML-based document markup standard specifying the structure and semantics of documents – imaging reports, discharge summaries – exchanged among providers and patients.

The process by which C-CDAs are made human readable is called rendering: a chief requirement of the documents is that all relevant clinical content be present – and renderable – in human readable form.

But oftentimes an "overabundance of data is rendered by the electronic health records system based on C-CDA documents that are being sent/received," according to HL7.

That means clinical staff then have to page through all the data to pinpoint the relevant information that triggered the clinical event for which the C-CDA document was created.

[See also: Usability, CCDA Documents and ABBI]

"EHR vendors, for numerous and admirable reasons, typically render more information than clinicians want, sometimes including the patient's entire medical history," according to HL7. "A viewer that makes relevant information easier to view would save clinicians' time and insure they do not miss the information they need to make decisions."
 
The new C-CDA Rendering Tool Challenge launched by HL7, in collaboration with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, is focused on finding a viewer that lets clinicians effectively review the patient data that's most clinically relevant to them from C-CDA documents.

The viewer should enable rendering of the data as specified by the user, and allow clinicians to quickly review the current health and needs of a patient, according to the contests' guidelines, and should provide functionality to allow healthcare professionals to quickly assess the status and state of the patient.

It must be easy to use – presenting requested data quickly and clearly, "whether through section-based view preferences (ordering), filter functions, intelligent sorting, or some other functionality," according to HL7.

First place awards $15,000, second place $5,000. Submissions are eligible until May 31, 2016, with a winner to be announced in September. Learn more about how to enter here.