Q&A with Bryn Lewis, PhD: HL7 C-CDA® Rendering Tool Challenge Winner

Q&A With Bryn Lewis, PhD

First Place Winner of the HL7 C-CDA® Rendering Tool Challenge

On Tuesday, September 12, HL7 announced the winners of the HL7 Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (C-CDA®) Rendering Tool Challenge. 

Bryn Lewis, PhD, a principal software development consultant at Intelsoft in Melbourne, Australia, developed the award-winning tool, Intelsoft C-CDA Viewer. Dr. Lewis's tool is an easy-to-use viewer of complex C-CDA documents available in any web browser.

C-CDA® Rendering Tool Challenge Background

Many clinicians are frustrated with the usability of C-CDA documents. Currently, an overabundance of data is rendered and sent to providers, requiring them to spend time sorting through data that is not relevant to their immediate needs.

HL7 and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) addressed this need by issuing a tool challenge to develop a viewer to enable clinicians to select the C-CDA document data most clinically relevant to them and display such data in an order they prefer.

The tool was required to meet the following criteria:

• Render the data as specified by the clinician thereby allowing him/her to quickly review the current health and needs of the patient
• Present requested data quickly and clearly through section-based view preferences (ordering), filter functions, intelligent sorting or some other functionality

Dr. Lewis was kind enough to share answers to the following questions ... 

Q: How would you describe the tool? 

Dr. Lewis: The Intelsoft C-CDA Viewer is an easy-to-use viewer of complex C-CDA documents, available directly in any web browser. A responsive document layout automatically adjusts to make optimum use of the available screen space. Users can hide, collapse and move any section of a CDA document.

• Document sections can be manipulated directly via button clicks, drag and drop or via a document Table Of Contents
• All user preferences are saved and automatically applied to subsequent CDA documents opened
• Ability to detect and hide/show duplicates

The result is an intuitive and easy to use document layout that users can control directly. All this using simple deployment via a local fileset or web server (and it's very pretty).

Q: How long did it take you to develop the tool?

Dr. Lewis: The tool was developed as a side project in March and April of this year, using time in between other projects. Starting as an idea, it eventually demanded that it be finished.

Q: Do you have future plans for your award-winning tool? 

Dr. Lewis:  There are some further functions that could be implemented and it is likely to be integrated into any Intelsoft products that use CDA. For example, it could be incorporated into a mobile app that receives CDA. 

If you wish to  to use it, the source is available on github.  Installation is very easy (download and open index.htm).  

Q: What other projects are you working on? 

Dr. Lewis: I'm currently working on a number of web-based systems, all designed for direct clinician use:

• Clinical audit and clinical handover
• Extended stay patient management
• Medical task management

All of these projects involve HL7 interfaces and aim to provide easy-to-use tools for clinicians.

 Q: What do you plan to do with the prize money? 

Dr. Lewis:  I will travel to Washington, DC to visit the Capitol, the Smithsonian and of course attend HL7's 30th Annual Plenary & Working Group Meeting in Baltimore. 

Watch a demo of the Intelsoft C-CDA Viewer