Constructing scenarios for validating the electronic health care record architecture

The CEN TC 251 Electronic Health Care Record Architecture is the first part of a four part communication prestandard intended to facilitate the safe communication of clinical information, irrespective of circumstances related to time, distance, and responsibility. The work has important implications for a diversity of stakeholders and must embody clinical principles if it is to succeed. The issue at hand is how to enable clinicians to validate the reference architecture, which is necessarily a technical document, so that they have confidence that it can meet the clinical requirement for safe communication. A model of communication that has been used to ground the architecture is shown to be useful in creating relevant clinical scenarios to permit the first steps towards coherent validation in a systematic way.