The HL7 CCOW Standard

HL7 CCOW Resources Page

What is CCOW?

The HL7 CCOW (Clinical Context Object Workgroup) Standard is vendor independent and allows clinical applications to share information at the point of care.

Using a technique called "context management", CCOW provides the clinician with a unified view on the information held in separate and disparate healthcare applications referring to the same patient, encounter or user. This means that when a clinician signs on to one application within the group of disparate applications tied together by the CCOW environment, that same sign-on is simultaneously executed on all other applications within the group. Similarly, when the clinician selects a patient, the same patient is selected in all the applications. CCOW then builds a combined view of the patient on one screen.

CCOW works for both client-server and web-based applications. The acronym CCOW stands for "Clinical Context Object Workgroup", a reference to the standards committee within the HL7 group that developed the standard. Read more in HL7 CCOW Books and Guides.

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Note: This page is intended as a resource for implementers and users of HL7's CCOW Standard. We are striving to make this list as comprehensive as possible. Please let us know if we have missed any useful CCOW link. Inclusion in this list does not imply an endorsement.

Please e-mail us about other relevant CCOW Resources. Thank You.

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