Continuity of Care Record - The CCR Standard

The CCR Standard

The CCR standard is a patient health summary standard. It is a way to create flexible documents that contain the most relevant and timely core health information about a patient, and to send these electronically from one caregiver to another. It contains various sections such as patient demographics, insurance information, diagnoses and problem list, medications, allergies and care plan. These represent a "snapshot" of a patient's health data that can be useful or possibly lifesaving, if available at the time of clinical encounter. The ASTM CCR standard is designed to permit easy creation by a physician using an electronic health record (EHR) system at the end of an encounter.

Because it is expressed in the standard data interchange language known as XML, a CCR can potentially be created, read and interpreted by any EHR or EMR software application. A CCR can also be exported in other formats, such as PDF and Office Open XML (Microsoft Word 2007 format).

The Continuity of Care Document (CCD) is an HL7 CDA implementation of the Continuity of Care Record (CCR). It is generally possible to convert a CCR document into CCD using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), however it is not always possible to perform the inverse transformation as some CCD features are not supported in CCR. HITSP provides reference information that demonstrates how CCD and CCR (as HITSP C32) are embedded in CDA. There is some debate whether the CCR and CCD standards will continue to coexist, with CCR providing for basic information requests and CCD servicing more detailed requests, or whether the newer CCD standard may eventually supplant CCR.