openEHR Specifications

for an interoperable healthcare information platform

'openEHR' is the name of a technology, consisting of open specifications, clinical models and software that can be used to create standards, and build information and interoperability solutions for healthcare. It is completely model-driven, and separates domain semantics out from software, into models created by domain professionals.

The openEHR specifications consist of information models for healthcare data, including the EHR (how to record clinical observations?) and Demographics (parties, roles and relationships), a portable Query Language (AQL), the Archetype formalism (adopted by ISO 13606-2:2019) for expressing domain content, the CDS Guidelines and Care Pathways, and an open API specification.

openEHR Primer

What should I read first?

If you are a developer and want to get to work right away, we recommend the following:

• skim the Architecture Overview,
• browse through the global UML site or class index,
• make the Implementation Technologies (ITS) page or the REST API your home.

If you are an architect or just want to understand the platform architecture properly, we recommend reading/skimming the following guides:

• Architecture Overview
• Archetype Technology Overview
• CDS, Guidelines and Planning Overview

The specifications are managed by the Specifications Editorial Committee (SEC), with extensive input from the community. If you are interested in details of the governance process, see the governance and change management section.

If you are mainly interested in open source implementations and code bases, see the implementation page or go straight to openEHR@Github.

How are the Specifications organised?

The specifications come in 3 categories:

• abstract specifications: platform-independent UML information models, service interfaces, Antlr grammars etc;
• implementation technology specifications (ITS): platform-specific specs, including XSDs, JSON-schema, REST APIs
• conformance specification: defining the basis of conformance testing and product profiling.

Within these categories are separate components, each containing specifications on a specific topic. For convenience, some of the components are in groups, as visualise with this diagram.

Release baseline Development baseline Implementation Technologies

Where can I discuss Specifications and Implementation?

We have extensive discussion groups at the openEHR Discourse site, particularly the following categories:

• Tool support - for reporting issues with tools
• Implementation
  • Apps
  • Platform
• Specifications
  • ITS
  • Reference Model
  • Archetypes and ADL
  • AQL / Querying
  • Process/CDS/Guidelines

See also the openEHR Wiki - specifications space and openEHR Jira specification projects.