the role of clinical templates

Clinical templates contribute to three important goals of eHealth:

• managing and improving the clinical content of systems as a valuable resource
• specifying the information requirements of clinical care
• implementing information standards for system interoperability (exchanging and processing data between systems)

information standards: openEHR

openEHR is an international organisation developing and supporting an open specification for Electronic Health Record systems.

In openEHR, sample forms are used as input to a modelling process which abstracts their common components (data items, values, structures and rules for their use), and specifies these as one or more archetypes. Archetypes can then be combined and refined as openEHR templates, which can be further combined and customised for local use.

ClinicalTemplates.org will contribute to this process in two ways:

• by developing and sharing sources of good quality ‘input’ templates and forms
• by developing or re-using tools for future templates to be based on standardised openEHR archetypes and templates