Continuity of Care Record

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Continuity of Care Record (CCR)^[1] is a health record standard specification developed jointly by ASTM International, the Massachusetts Medical Society [1] (MMS), the HIMSS (HIMSS), the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), the American Academy of Pediatrics [2] (AAP), and other health informatics vendors.

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 care giver to another. It contains various sections such as patient demographics, insurance information, diagnosis 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 and EMR software applications. A CCR can also be exported in other formats, such as PDF and Microsoft Word format.

An explanation of the utility theory which affects the healthcare industry standards adoption is defined in a white paper for CCR.[3]