Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator: Making Clinical Documentations an Absolutely Easy Task

The Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator (CDSA) from Microsoft is a Clinical Health Platform software solution aimed at helping the healthcare industry enhance and maximize performance through comprehensive applications. CDSA allows users to easily compose secure clinically encoded documents by using the well known Microsoft Office System as a base tool, and by following industry standard encoding formats.

With the installation of CDSA, document templates formatted to contain clinical and patient medical information can be added to Microsoft Office System. CDSA users access these templates through Microsoft Office Word application. This gives healthcare experts and medical professionals an easy to use documenting environment considering the widespread use of Microsoft Office applications in daily computing. Additionally, template designers can compose user defined or system compatible clinical document templates for custom uses.

However, CDSA is only available in Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Office 2010. Perhaps later versions of Microsoft Office tools will be able to support CDSA in older office versions.

Templates used to create clinical documentations can be created to contain information aimed to be integrated with other medical applications. Once CDSA is installed, document templates can be created in Microsoft Office Word with the help of basic programming skills. Moreover, CDSA clinical documents can also be shared with other users and uploaded to contents of personal heath records such as Microsoft HealthVault.

In terms of data sources, Clinical Documentation Solution Accelerator can be connected to an external or internal data source allowing Microsoft Office tools to produce dynamic contents. Data sources can be obtained from an organization's maintained database solution that provides arrays of medical information and terminologies. Cloud computing options such as Windows Azure also offers compatibility with CDSA for the application to obtain data from offsite data sources available to many. Integrating CDSA with an existing SharePoint collaboration setup is also possible.

Users who do not have CDSA add-in installed on their system can still render CDSA encoded documents, but with limited function of viewing only. However, these documents may still be uploaded to other compatible health care facilities and print outs can still be produced.