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Terminology is as old as computers in health care. Initially used to minimise disk space, the use of terminologies has grown to classify health care offered and more recently, through use of SNOMED-CT (IHTSDO) to support automated clinical process. Archetypes, and openEHR for that matter, are designed to work with terminology. Every term in an archetype can be 'bound' to a terminology to better understand the authors intent. Further, archetypes allow expression of subsets to determine which terms are appropriate values at a given data point. This is called a 'constraint definition' and is really a placeholder for a valueset that is offered to the user within the application.
Terminologies used in Healthcare inlcude ICD-10 (and its predecessor ICD-9), SNOMED-CT, LOINC and many others.
Clinical process including guidelines, workflow and pathways.
The aim of all this work is to support the automated processing of health information to assist people and their health care providers in achieving the best possible health outcomes. A great deal of work and research has gone into establishing the means of providing this assistance. With openEHR, it is possible for the first time to express the process statements that depend on health information (such as take prednisolone 50mg daily if the peak flow measurement drops below 200 L/min on two consecutive mornings) in formal terms. This is because openEHR has a language for querying the record that allows statements to be made based on the archetypes that specify the information.