The Health Information Models space is for discussions about formalised models of health domain content. In the openEHR Framework there are a number of innovations that make it relatively straightforward to specify and share clinical content. The foundations are the clinical models, consisting of archetypes and templates. These models require terminology and finally the models need to support automated clinical process, offering the clinician users decision support and suggesting quality care options in the form of computerised clinical pathways.
Clinical Models
Models of clinical information exist in every computer system that is used in health care. While doctors, nurses and other health professionals share many clinical concepts and can communicate very effectively about these concepts, computers have not had a standard means of representing clinical information. openEHR offers this capability and in doing so provides a platform for health care computing. If we do not have such a platform then the benefits of computing in health care will be very slow coming and require absolutely massive investment.
Archetypes
Archetypes are the fundamental shareable specifications of clinical information we need to provide quality health care, and have been formally accepted as a European standard in 2007 (CEN 13606 Part II)and now being considered by ISO. Each archetype represents a whole, discrete specification which is as inclusive as possible, always in terms of the openEHR reference model. The reference model itself guarantees that the key attributes for information in health records (such as who, when and where) are already taken care of and do not need to be addressed in each archetype. Further, the reference model has 5 different entry classes which provide the attributes and structures required for all the different sorts of information stored in a health record.
openEHR archetypes offer great advantage over HL7 templates as complex data can be specified in a manner that is understandable to health professionals and IT staff. It is a very efficient way to manage the specification of information we want to share between health care systems.
Templates
Templates are a further means of building clinical models, composed or archetypes and adding 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
Terminologies used in Healthcare