RDA, the digital care summary

The Resumen Digital de Atención en Salud (RDA), Colombia’s digital care summary, is a structured electronic document that brings together the relevant clinical data from a care encounter and is exchanged between providers through the national interoperability platform.

It was adopted by Resolution 1888 of 2025 within the framework of electronic health record interoperability.

In short

• What it is: a structured summary of one care encounter, not the full clinical record.
• Who generates it: the provider delivering the care, from its own information system.
• What it contains: the relevant clinical data elements defined in Resolution 866 of 2021.
• Which standard: HL7 FHIR R4, following the official implementation guide published by the Ministry of Health and Social Protection (MinSalud).
• What it is for: so the next professional who treats that patient can see what happened before, without depending on the patient to tell them.

The four types of RDA

Resolution 1888 defined four types for the initial implementation, and left the door open for MinSalud to add more:

Type	What it captures
Patient	The relevant clinical data once a care event occurs
Inpatient care	What comes out of in-hospital care, for continuity, referral and counter-referral
Outpatient care	What is generated in outpatient encounters
Emergency department	What comes out of immediate care, available right away to continue the care process

The logic behind the split is use: whoever receives a referred patient needs the inpatient one; whoever sees that patient at an outpatient follow-up needs the outpatient one.

That open door has already been used. Resolution 1799 of 2026 amended Resolution 1888 and added information on the dispensing of medicines and health technologies, covering the chain from prescription to actual delivery to the patient. Pharmaceutical managers (gestores farmacéuticos) and IPS (instituciones prestadoras de salud, Colombia’s healthcare provider institutions) with a pharmacy service have six months from September 1, 2026 to adapt their systems.

What data it carries

The content isn’t up to each vendor. Resolution 1888 points to the relevant clinical data elements in Resolution 866 of 2021, which make up the minimum standardized information needed to guarantee interoperability and continuity of care.

In day-to-day terms, that covers what a clinician would need to pick up a case: patient identification, the provider and professional delivering care, reason for and type of care, diagnoses, procedures performed, medications, relevant alerts such as allergies, and the results or outcomes of care.

The key is in the word “standardized.” Having the data is not enough: it has to be coded with the official catalogs, because free text is not interoperable.

How it is built technically

MinSalud published an official RDA implementation guide (version 1.0.0, from December 2025) that defines the technical detail. The essentials:

Standard. HL7 FHIR R4, the international standard for exchanging health information. The RDA is assembled as a FHIR Bundle: a package that groups a composition document and the associated clinical resources: patient, encounter, conditions, procedures, medications and observations.

Profiles. The guide defines Colombian profiles on top of the FHIR base resources. A Colombian Patient has its own identification rules that a generic Patient does not.

Terminologies. It relies on code catalogs and value sets published by MinSalud: ICD-10 and ICD-11 for diagnoses, CUPS (Colombia’s standard procedure classification) for procedures, IUM (the national medicine identifier) for medications, and international standards such as LOINC and SNOMED CT for observations and clinical concepts.

Security. The technical annex requires encrypted transport and authentication with credentials issued by MinSalud. It is not an open submission: each institution operates with its own technical identity.

Services. Three, defined in Article 3 of Resolution 1888: generation, submission, and search and retrieval.

What it means for an IPS information system

This is where theory meets operations, and where problems tend to show up.

The RDA is built from the record, not separately. If your system asks someone to fill in an extra screen to “generate the summary,” what you have is double data entry under another name. The summary should come from what the professional already documented.

The catalogs have to be at the point of capture. If the doctor types the diagnosis as free text and an assistant codes it later, the data arrives late and arrives different.

A missing required field blocks submission. What used to be a tolerable incomplete record is now a document the platform does not accept. That is why pre-submission validation matters: the error gets fixed while the patient is still at the institution.

Looking them up is half the value. The RDA documents that others generated should be visible inside the patient’s record, at the moment of care. A system that only sends turns interoperability into a cost with nothing in return.

How Omneri solves it

In Omneri, the RDA is built from the clinical record that already exists. The professional documents care the way they always do, with the catalogs available in every field, and the system assembles the summary from that data.

• Assisted coding at the point of capture, so the diagnosis, the procedure and the medication come from the official catalog during the encounter.
• The four RDA types, each derived from its corresponding workflow: outpatient care, emergency department, inpatient care and care event.
• Pre-submission validation, showing which field is missing and in which record, so it can be corrected before closing.
• External RDA documents viewed inside the patient’s record, not in a separate inbox.
• Access traceability on every lookup of clinical information.

You can see what it looks like inside or request a demo based on your own operation.