Home // International Journal On Advances in Life Sciences, volume 9, numbers 3 and 4, 2017 // View article

Implementation of openEHR in combination with clinical terminologies: Experiences from Norway

Authors:
Rune Pedersen
Conceição Granja
Luis-Marco Ruiz

Keywords: eHealth medical records; electronic health records; web technology; e-health; interoperability; semantics; integrated care; OpenEHR; terminology; classification systems

Abstract:
Norway is currently involved in several initiatives to adopt clinical information standards and terminologies. This paper aims to identify and discuss challenges and experiences for large-scale national implementation projects when working towards structured Electronic Health Records systems, process and decision support, and secondary use of clinical data. This paper reports from the national strategy for OpenEHR adoption in Northern Norway Regional Health Authority encouraged by the development of a national repository for OpenEHR archetypes and a national initiative to integrate clinical terminologies. The paper contributes to a qualitative longitudinal interpretive study with an effort to increase the possibility to obtain semantic interoperability (towards integrated care) and discusses Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms and other relevant clinical terminology and Clinical Information Models such as OpenEHR archetypes. Terminology and archetypes are used to structure the EHR two-folded, and we discuss a general use of information models to increase interoperability extensively. A two-folded use of terminology where terminology is integrated in archetypes, or where terminology is used to structure the Electronic Health Record system while using the hierarchical model of the terminology is dis-cussed. Secondly, we discuss for what purpose OpenEHR is the choice of Clinical Information Model to succeed in Norwegian healthcare. We have identified some challenges and lessons learned.

Pages: 82 to 91

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2017. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2017

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2660