Description

The HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA®) is a primary standard of Health Level Seven (HL7) and used millions of times each day for the exchange of patient summaries and other medical documents.

CDA is a document markup standard that specifies the structure and semantics of clinical documents for the purpose of exchange between patients, healthcare providers, and other stakeholders. It defines a clinical document as having the following six characteristics:

1. Persistence
2. Stewardship
3. Potential for authentication
4. Context
5. Wholeness
6. Human readability

The CDA Standard

All of the following are equivalent representations of CDA R2.0. The top row is the Normative version.

Date	Version	Description
2024-08-28	2.0.0-OnlineNavigation	CDA R2.0 Online Navigation (Normative) This makes the original CDA R2.0 publication web accessible.
2024-05-17	2.0.0-sd	CDA R2.0 in Structure Definition Format (Informative) This supports CDA implementation guides authored using StructureDefinition. It includes all SDTC extensions that are approved by HL7.
2025-01-08	2025-01-08	CDA R2.0 Extension Schema This is the CDA schema with all SDTC extensions that are approved by HL7.
2025-05-20	v4.1.0-beta.2	CDA R2.0 Stylesheet This is an informative stylesheet based on XSLT 1.0 which offers an example of how to render a CDA document.
2010-06-24	2.0.0	CDA R2.0 This is the original 2010 CDA R2.0 publication available via download only.

Interactive Graphical Map of CDA (click to navigate)

Graphical Map of CDA (CDA Refined Message Information Model, R-MIM, Diagram)