CCOW is a standard for single sign-on and clinical context management designed to reduce administrative overload and improve interoperability and workflow.

Single sign on allows a clinical user to access multiple applications on his/her computer via a single username and password, permitting browsing/ search of a single patient's details across these applications.

Context Management allows a user to gain a unified view of a specific focus, a patient or patient encounter for example, across multiple clinical applications at a single point of use.

The standard has been adopted in the USA and Canada in particular with many commercial vendors now supplying CCOW-compliant clinical information systems.

The CCOW project was initiated by a group of healthcare providers and vendors (in which Sentillion, Inc. played a leading role) before becoming part of HL7 in the late 1990s.