Healthcare Software

Sample CCR and CCD XML files

You bought the official CCD standards document, you have a grasp on what the different is between a ClinicalDocument, a StructuredBody and a CCD Component, and now it's time to put it into practice in an XML file. Where to begin? Example XML files would be really useful.

Surprisingly, it's a challenge to find good examples and samples of XML files that follow the CCR and CCD standards. Below we've put together a list of the best examples found on the internet.

CCR XML Files

It's not quite an XML file, but this 13 minute CCR XML video tutorial is a good place to start to make sure you've got the basics under your belt.

Google Health gives some good XML samples of their particular subset of the CCR standard. Another example in the Google Health .NET reference. In fact, you can generate your own CCR xml files as mentioned in this blog -  but again they will only represent the subset of information that Google Health supports.

This CCR introduction gives another small practical XML snippet.

CCD XML Files

First, it's important to keep in mind CCD is simply a constraint on the larger HL7 CDA standard, so most CDA XML examples will work as CCD samples as well. For example the official HL7 page offers a number of CDA specifications and variants that each come with XML snippets and full illustrative XML files. 

Wikipedia points to this government site for CDA and CCD samples embedded within the various downloadable documentation.

If you're looking for a quick introduction, the CCD quickstart guide gives several good samples, in both CCD and CCR, allowing you to also compare the mapping from one to the other and understand the evolution of the CCR and CDA standards to the collaborative CCD standard. The zip file contains two XML files, each one following one of the two standards. Not only are they very complete representations, but since they are based on the same source information, it is very useful to compare the mapping from one to the other and to understand the evolution of the CCR and CDA standards to the collaborative CCD standard.

A lot of these examples tend to always revolve around the same "toy data". For some real world data examples, we had luck browsing open forums. For example on the Mirth (open source HL7 parser) forum, I found this post with multiple real-world CCD XML files (need to register to view).

Integrating a 3rd-party E-Prescribe Engine Into Your EMR

Why use a 3rd party e-prescribe application in your EMR instead of building one from scratch?

There are many reasons to do this - developing an e-pharmacy module is a significant development effort and requires a lot of domain-specific expertise.

Moreover, e-prescribing tools only become really effective once they are SureScripts certified and they need to be continually updated with the latest prescription data. A lot of effort in cost and time if it's not your core competency. 

So with 100+ certified e-prescribe engines already out there, why re-invent the wheel?