openEHR

Overview

openEHR is an open specification for electronic health records that separates clinical knowledge (expressed as archetypes and templates) from the underlying technical infrastructure, enabling vendor-neutral, semantically rich EHR systems. Its key innovation is that clinical concepts are defined once as archetypes in a shared repository (CKM, Clinical Knowledge Manager) and then reused across any openEHR-compliant system. openEHR integrates bidirectionally with HL7 FHIR and is used in national EHR rollouts in several European countries.

Key Concepts

An archetype is a reusable clinical concept definition (e.g. Blood Pressure, Neurological Examination Finding) in a formal, queryable format. A template combines archetypes for a specific use case (e.g. ICU admission form, epilepsy clinic note). AQL (Archetype Query Language) is a SQL-like query language for openEHR data. The CKM (Clinical Knowledge Manager) is the international archetype library at https://ckm.openehr.org.

Connections

• Maps to: HL7 FHIR (bidirectional mapping), SNOMED CT (archetype term bindings), OMOP CDM (ETL pathway)

Resources

• https://openehr.org
• https://ckm.openehr.org (Clinical Knowledge Manager — archetype library)