Common Data Architecture for Life Sciences (CDA)

The Common Data Architecture for Life Sciences (CDA) is a new industry standard for referring to HCPs, HCOs, clinical operations, and products and diseases.

All life sciences organizations can use CDA to communicate and collaborate more effectively with each other using these universal data components.

For more information about this open standard, see veeva.com/cda/.

Key highlights

  • CDA is freely available for all life sciences organizations to implement and use.

  • Vault CRM, Network, and OpenData have adopted the CDA HCP and HCO kernels.

  • The CDA kernels contain the following components: entities (HCPs, HCOs, Addresses), attributes, and picklists.

    Note: The Segment object from the HCP and HCO kernels are not currently added to Network.

  • For existing customers that integrate with Veeva CRM, there are no changes; CDA fields will be off by default.

  • OpenData will provide values for most CDA fields on the HCP, HCO, and Address objects on OpenData records.

  • For locally managed (gray) records and third party managed records, Network provides the ability to calculate CDA fields based on the legacy fields.

  • Data change requests can be submitted for CDA fields.

Country support

CDA is available for most countries supported by Veeva OpenData.

The following countries are not supported:

  • China

  • Hong Kong

  • Japan

  • Macao

About the CDA in Network

Network supports the following kernels:

The kernels contain entities, attributes, and picklists.

The related Address entity is included in the HCP and HCO kernels.

CDA fields

CDA fields for HCPs, HCOs, and Addresses can be Veeva-managed or locally managed.

For details, see CDA data model fields.

CDA Sync Calculation

Network supports the legacy fields and the new CDA fields. CDA Sync is a process that runs in the backend on your Network instance to calculate the values from the legacy fields to the CDA fields.

For more details, see CDA Sync.

Vault CRM - Network integration.

Vault CRM, Network, and OpenData support the CDA HCP and HCO kernels, so you can view and manage CDA fields between these applications.

Supported integration features

  • Vault CRM Bridge

  • Data change requests

For information about CDA and Vault CRM, see Vault CRM: Data Model Updates for CDA.

Enable CDA in Network

New customers

CDA fields are enabled and implemented by default in new Network instances so new customers can use the standardized data structure for these applications from the start.

Existing customers

CDA fields will be available in existing instances, but they will not be enabled by default.

Administrators can enable CDA fields for their Network instance when they are ready to begin adopting this new standard.

To enable CDA for your existing Network instance:

  1. In the Admin console, click Settings > General Settings.

  2. Click Edit.

  3. In the Common Data Architecture (CDA) Data Model section enable the following settings:

    • Enable CDA Sync - Sync calculated CDA fields with legacy fields in your Network instance.

      This setting enables the CDA Sync Calculation and turns on the workflow process for the CDA data model.

      Only impacts enabled CDA fields that are locally managed.

      Note: This setting does not need to be enabled in your instance to get data from OpenData in CDA fields.

    • Enable CDA Data Model - Enable all CDA data model fields for HCPs, HCOs, and Addresses.

      This setting cannot be turned off after it has been enabled. Individual fields can be turned off in the data model.

  4. Save your changes.

Enable the HCO kernel

When Network started supporting CDA, only the HCP kernel was supported.

If you enabled the CDA data model in your Network instance to use the HCP kernel, you can now just manually enable the HCO CDA fields.

To enable the HCO CDA fields:

  1. In the Admin console, click Data Model.

    The Customer Master data domain displays by default.

  2. In the Objects section, select Health Care Organization.

  3. In the Fields section, for each CDA field, toggle the Disabled icon to be Enabled.

    See HCO kernel for a list of the fields to manually enable.

  4. Save your changes.