scope:

This document specifies a means for communicating part or all of the electronic health record (EHR) of one or more identified subjects of care between EHR systems, or between EHR systems and a centralised EHR data repository.

It can also be used for EHR communication between an EHR system or repository and clinical applications or middleware components (such as decision support components) that need to access or provide EHR data, or as the representation of EHR data within a distributed (federated) record system.

This document will predominantly be used to support the direct care given to identifiable individuals, or to support population monitoring systems such as disease registries and public health surveillance. Uses of health records for other purposes such as teaching, clinical audit, administration and reporting, service management, research and epidemiology, which often require anonymization or aggregation of individual records, are not the focus of this standard series but such secondary uses might also find it useful.

This document defines an Archetype Model to be used to represent Archetypes when communicated between repositories, and between archetype services. It defines an optional serialised representation, which may be used as an exchange format for communicating individual archetypes. Such communication might, for example, be between archetype libraries or between an archetype service and an EHR persistence or validation service.