CIAO was developed as part of the HSCIC innovation hub.  It was created to connect and share care information between and from multiple care providers and provide a need for system integration or middleware technology to connect different care providers together.  It aimed to share time and skill barriers by using commercial and open source middleware products and frameworks. 

The first CIAO integration developed was the eDischarge community of practice. This supported the transfer of care initiative. 

This work took information from the my eDischarge system and send it to the GP electronically. It aimed to give timely information to improve patient care for patients who have had been in hospital. 

The CIAO integration is a discharge summary document generated from a local clinical system.  The ciao-docs-parser CIP can pick these documents up, parse out any content that can be sensibly and safely extracted. If necessary “enrich” that information with other information (either static information about the local trust or department, or information from other local data sources and in future national sources such as PDS). Then convert the information into a structured CDA document (in line with nationally defined “transfer of care” standards), and send the generated document to the GP via the Spine (or other routes such as ITK web services).