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Templates are a further means of building clinical models, ; these are composed of one or more archetypes and adding add further constraints required for the use of those archetypes in a particular setting. Thus, archetypes for blood pressure, weight and blood sugar may be used when recording an annual review of a diabetic person or in an antenatal visit by a pregnant woman. That is to say, templates will be created that are specific to 'diabetic review' and 'antenatal visit'.
Terminology
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.