OpenSDE

Introduction

OpenSDE is a free open source EMR developed by Department of medical informatics, Erasmus University Rotterdam as of March 2003[1,2].

The root to guide the design is the hierarchical structure of medical knowledge: each concept is described by other concepts. For example: examination of heart is described by percussion of heart and auscultation of heart, auscultation of heart is described by heart sounds and possibly a cardiac murmur, a cardiac murmur is described by its phase in the heart cycle, its loudness, its location, its propagation etc

.OpenSDE includes a thesaurus of concepts and a tree to represent this concept hierarchy. Each node in the tree represents a medical concept in a unique context, which is further described by its branching nodes. The depth of the tree reflects the granularity. OpenSDE also includes a translator that allows translation of terms from the language in which the tree was modeled to another language. Additionally, an OpenSDE domain model represents the semantics for data collected with OpenSDE. Such a domain model is a generative model,i.e. it is the combination of terms in a path to a node that represents the meaning of a node. Therefore, concepts may appear in more than one path (‘severity’ in context of ‘chest pain’ or in context of ‘cough’). Hence, a single concept does not represent the meaning of a node.

Reference

• Los RK, van Ginneken AM, de Wilde M, van der Lei J. OpenSDE: Row modeling applied to generic structured data entry. JAMIA 2004; 11 (2):162-5
• Min Z, Baofen D, Weeber M, van Ginneken AM.Mapping OpenSDE domain models to SNOMED CT. Applied to the domain of cardiovascular disease.Methods Inf Med. 2006;45(1):4-9
• OpenSDE. http://sourceforge.net/projects/opensde