COPENHAGEN – The International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization (IHTSDO) and the openEHR Foundation will work together to develop 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 in systems for data capture, complex queries, clinical decision support and reporting.

The 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 presented 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.

The IHTSDO and openEHR have resolved to identify opportunities to address the practical implementation and evaluation challenges facing national e-health programs.

The work will be of immediate interest and relevance in countries where the use of clinical data archetypes and clinical terminology are already envisioned as part of the standardization process. Further, a growing number of e-health system vendors are recognizing that standardization of content is difficult to achieve without agreement on the structure of the information.

The first focus of the joint effort will be a member-led project to develop a logical record architecture through the UK Terminology Centre (the IHTSDO National Release Centre for the UK). The group will then focus on pan-European semantic interoperability of health records, the Framework Programme and the EuroRec Institute.