Creating openEHR content to different moments of care: Obstetrics emergency scenario

Abstract

Introduction: If health information systems used a common reference model to store patient data it would ease health data exchange and achievement of semantic interoperability. Aim: To describe the process and the issues related to developing openEHR content to be used during different moments in the Obstetrics scenario, namely to retrieve patient's data. Methods: It was conducted a search on two major repositories - openEHR and National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) - for archetypes to represent clinical concepts defined in a previous study (Obstetrics Scenario). The better-suited archetypes were chosen to design the templates. Results: 22 clinical concepts were identified and 21 of them could be covered by the archetypes. It was necessary 28 archetypes (23 openEHR / 5 NEHTA) to represent them (13 openEHR / 8 NEHTA). Discussion and Conclusion: This paper demonstrates that it was possible to create an openEHR template to describe the information needs during different moments of an Obstetrics scenario. A possible application is to use them to retrieve patient's data from external systems.