> data structure defined by a particular organisation but has no true > semantics in health, where as a discharge or referral is a common concept.
Well, not strictly true - the CCR has semantics that aren't the same as discharge or referral but they are seemingly clear to the CCR people - the CCR is a summary record that could be used by an (unknown at the time of composition) future health provider to continue the care of this patient. If it becomes popular it may become a common health concept. > developed by an organisation we would have millions of archetypes and no > semantic interoperability. Well, we'd maybe have multiple archetype sets (as opposed to one set of archetypes) each defined by different organisations. ASTM, NHS, NEHTA etc. I don't think we'd even break into the 1000's if every health standards body defined their own? I thought semantic interoperability was the ability to computationally recognise the similarities in archetyped data between systems using terminologies etc, therefore allowing data to be used across multiple systems. i.e. this is a soap 'plan' because it is in a section marked with the term binding for 'plan', and over here in this other completely different archetype we might have a similar section and therefore we know they have the same meaning. If semantic interoperability is just that everyone agrees to use the same definitions for everything, then we don't really need a fancy word like semantic interoperability for it. Its like saying we'd have semantic interoperability if everyone agreed to use the Medical Director database schema - which is true but pointless - if everyone agreed in the first place we wouldn't be worried about the semantics when we go to interoperate. I'm not suggesting that every player in the whole health system would be going around defining archetypes for everything. But surely we're not suggesting that there would only be ONE set of archetypes for the whole world (with templates making the constraints for local variations)? Andrew _______________________________________________ openEHR-clinical mailing list openEHR-clinical at openehr.org http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/openehr-clinical
