Often times end users may ask the question of why data is missing within their Patient Portal or EHR that they know should be contained within a CCD or CCDA. Often the end users may not realize that the CCD that is being rendered in their Patient Portal or EHR is a CCD that has had a stylesheet applied to the document (CCD). The stylesheet that is used to render the CCD is what gives the CCD nice formatting (usually in HTML) making it easy to read and understand.
This stylesheet is usually written in the XSLT Stylesheet language. Click on this link to learn more about XSLT Stylesheets.
A stylesheet is code which is programed to display specific data contained within a XML document (CCD) and is usually programed for user specific needs. Often times what may appear as missing data is not really missing data at all but rather an XLST Stylesheet that has been applied to the XML document that was not programed to display the data. In these cases the data is still contained within the CCD but just not being displayed to the end user. This can be remedied by working with the vender of the Patient Portal or EHR and modifying the XSLT to render the data.
