15 Relationship to Standards

The openEHR specifications make use of available standards where relevant, and as far as possible in a compatible way. However, for the many standards have never been validated in their published form (i.e. the form published is not tested in implementations, and may contain errors), openEHR makes adjustments so as to ensure quality and coherence of the openEHR models. In general, "using" a standard in openEHR may mean defining a set of classes which map it into the openEHR type system, or wrap it or express it in some other compatible way, allowing developers to build completely coherent openEHR systems, while retaining compliance or compatibility with standards. The standards relevant to openEHR fall into a number of categories as follows.

Standards by which openEHR can be evaluated

These standards define high-level requirements or compliance criteria which can be used to provide a means of normative comparison of openEHR with other related specifications or systems:

    * ISO/TR 20514. Health informatics - Electronic health record - Definition, scope, and context. ISO TC 215/WG 1.
    * ISO/TS 18308. Technical Specification for Requirements for an EHR Architecture. ISO TC 215/WG1. 

Standards which have influenced the design of openEHR specifications

The following standards have influenced the design of the openEHR specifications:

    * OMG HDTF Standards - general design
    * CEN EN 13606:2006: Electronic Health Record Communication
    * CEN HISA 12967-3: Health Informatics Service Architecture - Computational viewpoint 

Standards which have influenced the design of openEHR archetypes

The following standards are mainly domain-level models of clinical practice or concepts, and are being used to design openEHR archetypes and templates.

    * CEN HISA 12967-2: Health Informatics Service Architecture - Information viewpoint
    * CEN ENV 13940: Continuity of Care. 

Standards which are used "inside" openEHR

The following standards are used or referenced at a fine-grained level in openEHR:

    * ISO 8601: Syntax for expressing dates and times (used in openEHR Quantity package)
    * ISO 11404: General Purpose Data types (mapped to in openEHR assumed_types package in Support Information Model)
    * HL7 UCUM: Unified Coding for Units of Measure (used by openEHR Quantity data type)
    * HL7v3 GTS: General Timing Specification syntax (used by openEHR Time specification data types).
    * some HL7v3 domain vocabularies are mapped to the openEHR terminology.
    * IETF RFC 2440 - openPGP. 

Standards which require a conversion gateway

The following standards are in use and require data conversion for use with openEHR:

    * CEN EN 13606:2005: Electronic Health Record Communication - near-direct conversion possible, as openEHR and CEN EN 13606 are actively maintained to be compatible.
    * HL7v3 CDA: Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) release 2.0 - fairly close conversion may be possible.
    * HL7v3 messages. Quality of conversion currently unknown due to flux in HL7v3 messaging specifications and diversity of message schemas.
    * HL7v2 messages. Importing of HL7v2 message data is technically not difficult, and is already used in some openEHR systems. Export from openEHR may also be possible. 

Generic Technology Standards

The following standards are used or referenced in openEHR:

    * ISO RM/ODP
    * OMG UML 2.0
    * W3C XML schema 1.0
    * W3C Xpath 1.0