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openEHR Archetypes

Table of contents

Index of Archetypes

Archetypes available

openEHR
Clinical archetypes

Clinical archetypes available in tabular or graphical form with links to the HTML view and ADL:

  • English: as a Table, or as a 'clickable' Mindmap
  • (other languages coming soon)

openEHR
Demographic
archetypes

Test archetypes

Prototype
openEHR Knowledge Manager

The openEHR Knowledge Manager is under construction with an early prototype avaialbe. It has a user interface is generated dynamically from an ontology defined in Protégé, and its content is drawn from the openEHR clinical archetypes (see top group above).

What are archetypes?

Archetypes are formal content specifications, expressed in terms of constraints on a reference model. Any reference model can be used. For health computing, the openEHR reference model provides the basis for nearly all archetypes. Archetypes are combined together by templates, and used at runtime to create data, enable smart querying, and to support legacy data transformation. See the openEHR Archetypes FAQ for more general information.

Archetypes seem to be in a formal language....where are the specifications?

They are indeed in formal language, known as Archetype Definition Language, or ADL. The current version of this specification is the same used for the European Health Record standard (CEN 13606) and is called ADL 1.4; in future it is planned to move to - ADL 2. Archetypes and ADL comply to an archetype reference model, which is infact the model behind ADL 2. XML archetypes comply with the ADL 2.0 model.

Are there tools for editing archetypes?

There are various tools available for editing and viewing archetypes, including:

And, yes you can edit by hand it you want - the Archetype Workbench can be used to check archetypes.

What Archetypes are on this site?

This site contains a few hundred archetypes. The are currently organised in the following kind of hierarchy :

  • dev - openEHR core development archetypes 
  • dev-uk-nhs (NHS England)
  • dev-nl-TNO (Netherlands)
  • dev-uk-nhs-scotland (Scotland)
  • release - the space for quality assured released archetypes - this is currently being populated through the Archetype Editorial Group process.

At the moment, almost all the work is going on in the 'dev' area, which has the following structure:

  • adl
    • openehr - see openEHR reference model (approx 150)
      • ehr - see the openEHR EHR Information Model
        • composition - archetypes based on the openEHR Composition class (~10 archetypes)
        • section - archetypes based on the openEHR Section class (~15 archetypes)
        • entry - archetypes based on the openEHR Entry classes
          • observation (~50 archetypes)
          • evaluation (~20 archetypes
          • instruction (~5 archetypes)
          • action (~5 archetypes)
        • structure - archetypes based on the openEHR Structure classes (~10 archetypes)
        • cluster - based on the openEHR Cluster class (~15 archetypes)
        • element - based on the Element class
      • demographic - archetypes based on the openEHR Demographic IM
    • test - test archetypes (~20 archetypes)
    • cen-gpics - 2 demonstrations archetypes based on CEN GPICs
    • hl7-rim - 1 demonstration archetype based on the HL7v3 RIM
  • html
    • en - HTML renditions of archetypes in English
    • de - HTML renditions of archetypes in German
    • fa - HTML renditions of archetypes in Farsi
    • etc

How do archetypes get onto this site?

The openEHR Foundation has a Clinical Review Board which makes the decisions about the process for making archetypes available for general use with the openEHR tools. The actual decisions about specific archetypes are made by the Archetype Editorial Group and its sub-groups. There may be an effort already underway in your country.

Can I download all the archetypes at once?

THIS OPTION IS TEMPORARILY TURNED OFF

Yes.  If you are a windows user you will need to get hold of a product like 7.zip to unzip this file. Download all archetypes as tar.gz archive.

Otherwise, you can obtain the archetypes using TortoiseSVN. The URL for the repository is: http://www.openehr.org/svn/knowledge. To learn more about using Subversion (SVN) for openEHR, see the help pages.

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