Joint announcement: IHTSDO and openEHR Begin Collaborative Work Programme
14 September, 2009
IHTSDO and the
openEHR Foundation
are to work together on a harmonisation project where the overall goal is the
practical development of effective and sustainable clinical content for the
electronic health record. The project will explore how best to support those who
wish to use
openEHR™ archetypes and SNOMED CT™ terminology together
within current and future systems to support data capture, complex queries,
clinical decision support and reporting.
This initiative arose from an intergovernmental workshop with high-level
industry representation held in Helsingør, Denmark in November 2008, where the
openEHR Foundation and the IHTSDO were invited to present their
perspectives on how health informatics standards could best interact and
contribute to meeting the common needs of large-scale health information
infrastructure initiatives, worldwide. In response to this call for leadership
and wider consultation, IHTSDO and openEHR have resolved to identify
opportunities to align efforts to address the practical implementation and
evaluation challenges facing national eHealth programs, in a coordinated way.
This work will be of immediate interest and relevance in countries where the
use of clinical data archetypes and clinical terminology are already envisaged
as part of the standardisation process. Further, a growing number of e-health
system vendors are recognising that standardisation of content is difficult to
achieve within their own applications without agreement on the structure of the
information. In the first instance, IHTSDO and openEHR recognize the
potential value to these stakeholders and others in more active harmonization
efforts, including establishing principles to guide collaborative activities.
It is planned that a first practical focus of the joint effort will be mutual
engagement with and support of a member-led project to develop a logical record
architecture through the UK Terminology Centre (the IHTSDO National Release
Centre for the UK). The intent is then to take this work forward within a wider
context, including goals for pan-European semantic interoperability of health
records, the Framework Programme and the EuroRec Institute. The hope is that
this plan for collaboration will provide initial stepping stones towards global
extension of the work. To that end, it is envisaged that strategic oversight for
the joint programme will come from the wider global communities of the two
organisations.
IHTSDO and openEHR will draw from their respective pools of skilled
and experienced members to create the strongest possible team to take forward
the programme of work. They will also continue to collaborate, separately and
together, with others who wish to align with and work with them towards these
shared goals. They are resolved to use the experience gained as the basis for
confirming the collaborative vision, as well as aligning the products of the two
organisations within sustainable international governance and with clinical,
professional, ehealth program and industry engagement.
Full details of the openEHR/IHTSDO press release.
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