Established as a Standards Initiative in 2013, SDC is focused on the identification, testing and validation of standards necessary to enable an electronic health record (EHR) system to retrieve, display, and fill a structured form or template, and store/submit the completed form to an external system and/or repository.

The goal is to facilitate the re-use of structured data captured within EHRs for other purposes such as: clinical research, patient safety event reporting and adverse event reporting, public health reporting; and determination of coverage. 

The SDC Initiative identifies:

• Standards to represent the metadata required to describe common data elements (CDEs) that are used to fill specified forms or templates and the structure of the forms or templates that contain the CDEs.

• Health IT standards that EHR systems can use to interact with the structured forms or templates and the standard to enable the forms or templates to be auto-populated and/or pre-populated with data existing in the patient record.

To date, the project has defined the SDC standards within two implementation guides: IHE SDC Profile and HL7 FHIR SDC Profile.

To learn more about the SDC Initiative, please visit the wiki site here