Introduction

CDA is an XML-based HL7 standard for exchange of clinical information.

The only mandated use of CDA in general practice IT is receipt of 111 CDA referrals and reports.  However many localities have implemented solutions to ingest external documents in various formats including CDA.  For this reason suppliers may consider implementing CDA handling functionality for other use cases and payloads. 

However it should be noted that NHS standards for structured clinical document transmission are now being developed around FHIR and ITK3 and use of CDA is likely to be deprecated in the near future.

Requirements

If a system sends or receives CDA messages it must comply with the requirements included in the CDA document set:

Roadmap