Difference between revisions of "OpenEHR"

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The benefits of this approach is that the richness of clinical concepts can grow with time, without needing to change the software at a fundamental level. Also, ''open''EHR records can be carried on a USB stick or communicated in any way necessary. Australia conducted the first major trials of ''open''EHR in larger scale situations around 2004/5. Last year the UK NHS, although currently using HL7 CDA to carry clinical content, began to use the ''open''EHR formalism to capture clinical content specifications. The ability to generate relatively low fidelity communications (such as CDA) from the high fidelity ''open''EHR environment is proving to generate interest in this more comprehensive approach to storing and utilising personal health information. Implementations are now underway in the Netherlands with early work in Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, Chile as well as Australia.
 
The benefits of this approach is that the richness of clinical concepts can grow with time, without needing to change the software at a fundamental level. Also, ''open''EHR records can be carried on a USB stick or communicated in any way necessary. Australia conducted the first major trials of ''open''EHR in larger scale situations around 2004/5. Last year the UK NHS, although currently using HL7 CDA to carry clinical content, began to use the ''open''EHR formalism to capture clinical content specifications. The ability to generate relatively low fidelity communications (such as CDA) from the high fidelity ''open''EHR environment is proving to generate interest in this more comprehensive approach to storing and utilising personal health information. Implementations are now underway in the Netherlands with early work in Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, Chile as well as Australia.
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== Origins ==
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"So many systems describe themselves as electronic healthcare records and yet share little common concept of what such an entity is and what it is for."
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With this guiding principle and the experiences acquired from an early framework when GEHR was established in Europe in 1989, openEHR was envisioned to rise above the intervening influences from political, academic, and commercial forces to introduce a system that will be based on open standards, influenced more by clinical requirements established in ISO for electronic healthcare records.
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[[Category:EHR standard]]
 
[[Category:EHR standard]]

Revision as of 18:16, 12 September 2010

http://www.openehr.org/resources/skins/openehr/images/header.jpg

The openEHR Foundation is a non-profit charity based in the United Kingdom at University College London. It is now a community of more than 1200 people working on an open specification for a shared electronic health record, currently release 1.0.1. openEHR utilises a two level modelling approach developed in Australia. This approach means that the rules about how to represent clinical information in an openEHR record are captured in Archetypes which can be shared and evolve, while the parts from which these models are constructed are unchanging and in the fully specified reference model. The result is that software can be built on the rich and stable reference model, and the changing and evolving clinical concepts can be managed in a knowledge environment - called the archetype repository.

Archetypes carry with them rules that check the quality of the data and they can be used at data entry to ensure data quality. The display information is carried separately enabling the same information to be displayed in a different manner for different purposes. This makes the approach very flexible, so that personal health records can be displayed in a manner suitable for individual patients, sort of like skins for software programs.

The benefits of this approach is that the richness of clinical concepts can grow with time, without needing to change the software at a fundamental level. Also, openEHR records can be carried on a USB stick or communicated in any way necessary. Australia conducted the first major trials of openEHR in larger scale situations around 2004/5. Last year the UK NHS, although currently using HL7 CDA to carry clinical content, began to use the openEHR formalism to capture clinical content specifications. The ability to generate relatively low fidelity communications (such as CDA) from the high fidelity openEHR environment is proving to generate interest in this more comprehensive approach to storing and utilising personal health information. Implementations are now underway in the Netherlands with early work in Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, Chile as well as Australia.


Origins

"So many systems describe themselves as electronic healthcare records and yet share little common concept of what such an entity is and what it is for."

With this guiding principle and the experiences acquired from an early framework when GEHR was established in Europe in 1989, openEHR was envisioned to rise above the intervening influences from political, academic, and commercial forces to introduce a system that will be based on open standards, influenced more by clinical requirements established in ISO for electronic healthcare records.