Australian IT has a story about an implementation of the OpenEHR project (formerly GEHR), which is not the same as the OpenEMR project. Confusing? OpenEHR is sponsored by Ocean Informatics based in Australia, OpenEMR is sponsored by Pennington Firm and is United States based. “…Brisbane-based DSTC hopes its data management technology will become the backbone of the nationwide HealthConnect e-health record sharing network.

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The OpenEHR Foundation recently announced the formation of an Architectural Review Board (ARB). The OpenEHR group is particularly well connected so this is an announcement of import: ‘…We expect that there will be a lot more on show along this pathway over the coming year. From where we sit, we can see openEHR integrating straightforwardly and, in principle, uncontentiously, with current CEN and HL7 developments, offering distinctive discipline and simplicity into the emerging EHR domain. Our greatest hope is to see the openEHR community of users now progressively making the pace in pulling and pushing implementation. There are many signs of that, throughout the world, including on the openEHR discussion lists. Only two weeks ago, at a meeting of EU Accession States in Krakow, which I co- chaired, I joined a session in the middle of a presentation by a young and enthusiastic system developer from Hungary, who was speaking about his experience of using openEHR! That’s the kind of surprise one really enjoys! In the ARB, we hope we have a good way of supporting these next stages of endeavour…’

Ocean Informatics is announcing its specification for an Archetype Definition language (ADL). What is it good for? Short version: ‘future-proof information systems can be built’ with it which is handy in medicine. ‘…ADL provides all the syntax for describing constraints on any domain entity whose data is persisted in objects described by an information model (e.g. expressed in UML/OCL). It is primarily useful when generic information models are used for representing all data in a system, for example, where the logical concepts PATIENT, DOCTOR and HOSPITAL might all be represented using the class PARTY, ADDRESS, and related generic classes. Archetypes are then used to constrain the valid structures of instances of these generic classes to represent the desired domain concepts. In this way future-proof information systems can be built – relatively simple information models and database schemas can be defined, and archetypes supply the specific modelling, completely outside the software…

Thomas Beale on the OpenEHR list states: ‘The timetable for openEHR is roughly as follows: