openEHR Archetype Use and Reuse Within Multilingual Clinical Data Sets: Case Study.

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Clinical Informatics
• Information Standards

Background:

• Electronic health record data exchange remains limited despite decades of development.
• Traditional clinical content standards are often document- or message-focused.
• openEHR International has developed a governed ecosystem of reusable clinical information models called openEHR archetypes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the use and reuse of openEHR archetypes across multiple templates.
• To assess the feasibility and scalability of archetype reuse for diverse clinical data sets.
• To evaluate archetype reuse in the context of COVID-19 data collection and research.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of archetype occurrences and patterns within 7 independently created openEHR templates.
• Evaluation at the archetype and clinical concept levels.
• Focus on use-case agnostic archetypes within the openEHR Clinical Knowledge Manager.

Main Results:

• 203 instances of 58 unique archetypes were used across 7 templates.
• Archetype reuse ranged from 40% to 90% for specific templates and 40% to 100% overall.
• Templates covered diverse data sets including symptom screening, infection reporting, and clinical decision support.

Conclusions:

• Significant archetype reuse was demonstrated, even in novel and multilingual contexts.
• Findings support the openEHR hypothesis for a reusable, standards-based library of clinical information models.
• Reusable archetypes facilitate diverse health data set creation, promoting vendor-neutrality.