OpenEHR
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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 600 people working on an open specification for a shared electronic health record. 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 Archetypeswhich can be shared and evolve, while the parts from which these models are constructed are unchanging and in the 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 is the first country to take on openEHR in larger scale situations, with growing interest in other countries such as Sweden, India and Slovenia.
