Note to Balloters

This "ballot for comment" has been provided to solicit feedback on changes we would like to incorporate in the CDA R2.1 standard. As it has been 12 years since the CDA R2.0 standard was published, and it seemed appropriate to incorporate a wider discussion on CDA Implementation Guides and templates in general. As a result, we have added a new section, "Section 4 - CDA Implementation Guides". In other sections, where changes have been made we have attempted to indicate those changes by using this presentation.

As we indicated in the CDA R2.1 project scope statement, we have pre-adopted the new vocabulary binding syntax, where CWE has been replaced with "Open" and CNE are replaced with "Closed" and Fixed indicates a single code binding that can not be changed in implementation guides. Refer to "Section 2.3 - Vocabulary Use in CDA" for more on these changes. And likely the most notable change in this new version of the CDA standard, is "Section 5 - CDA Design", where we have included a series of CDA R-MIM diagrams and updated class attribute and value set tables to assist readers in understand the CDA's design and capabilities. We are interested in all feedback, but thought it important to call out these sections and content for your review.

Other more technical issues to call out.

The references in this standard are intended to access RIM 2.35 in the Normative Ballot. In this ballot, we have utilized content from the HL7 Normative Edition 2010. As a result, it is possible that a couple of links may not map. As we have attempted to make the links work in this draft, we welcome ballot comments on any broken links regardless of the cause.

The schema files need to be generated from the current CDA R2.1 R-MIM and manually updated to conform to the CDA R2.0 behaviors. Schemas referenced in Section 7 are mock ups and not conformant to the CDA R2.1 modeling. Please do not attempt to use them!

The appendix has been omitted from this ballot, but will be included in the Normative ballot to follow.