5 min readSEYON Insights
Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture, or C-CDA, is an XML standard for clinical documents such as patient summaries. A document has a header and structured sections. Two documents of the same type can still differ in how completely a section is populated.
Treat the document as a contract
Decide which sections the receiving system needs: problems, medications, allergies, results, or others. Extract those sections into a reviewed model. Leave a trace back to the source document so a questionable value can be checked. Do not flatten the entire XML tree into columns and hope the meaning survives.
Quality shows up in the exceptions
Missing sections, local codes, and narrative text that was never structured are normal. A production workflow needs a place to hold those exceptions. Sample documents used for development should be synthetic. Real summaries belong in the environments and agreements that govern them.