The quote in the title of the post is from David Kibbe, MD, MBA, who co-taught a workshop on the ASTM Continuity of Care Record Standard with Steven Waldren, MD, MS, in conjunction with the TEPR Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

I took the workshop on behalf of my work with the Calfornia Healthcare Foundation to look at creating a connectivity ecosystem for patients, families, and health stakeholders in a community, which I’ve started to blog about here.

It was a good workshop, with a nice step-through of the CCR standard, which for me was fairly straightforward to follow. Here’s a screenshot of the XML schema of a sample (test) CCR XML file. If you’re medically inclined, you’ll see that it’s an XML representation of a prednisone taper. I didn’t put this XML file together, but I consider this a sort of “hello, world” - to show that a clinical summary can be represented with a human and machine-readable file.

CCR is figuring into many well publicized Health 2.0 applications and I am of course a fan of anything that has its genesis in engaging patients in their care.