This profile describes how Health IT systems, Person Health Records, and HIEs can retrieve clinical knowledge on a topic suitable for presentation to a clinician or patient.
There are a great number of web resources available that support access of Clinical Knowledge on a specific disease, medical condition, set of symptoms or complaints, medications, et cetera for both clinicians and patients.  However, these resources have inconsistent representations of content, search APIs, and responses, making them difficult to integrate into Healthcare IT solutions. This profile provides a consistent set of rules for issuing knowledge requests for information that is either patient-, clinician- or payer-oriented, and on how to return results so that EHRs and PHRs can process the results and display them in a uniform way.
This profile combines information presently found in standards and implementation guides from Health Level 7 International (HL7), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and IHE to describe a single interface that can be used by any system needing access to clinical content.
