The use of standard content specifications in a national health interoperability framework

Abstract

The openEHR community has developed a specification that has been taken up by the standards community and has this year been adopted as ISO 13606. The specification offers an engineering and semantic framework for implementing an electronic health record (EHR) service within a service-oriented architecture. The semantic framework provides the means of agreeing the clinical and other content of the EHR independently of the implementation infrastructure. The clinical content is expressed using a formal language, itself part of the ISO standard, which ensures the content specifications provide a single computable source for many key artifacts required for semantic interoperability.