We are working on a OpenEHR based EHR solution for Ayurveda and Yoga practices. As the fundamental tenets of Ayurveda are different from the allopathy, we are in the process of creating a different set of archetypes as per their practice requirements. We would like to make them available to anybody else who may find them useful.
What is the best way to do this? Is it appropriate to add them to the OpenEHR CKM? or is that only for Allopathy specific archetypes? What should be the general framewok as like us others may be trying to adapt OpenEHR RM to other such practices around the world?
In case you have not heard of Ayurveda, please try these links
What do CKM maintainers think of having a separate CKM project or incubator or similar for this?
I’d be surprised if you need to adapt the RM in other ways than the usual constraints of archetyping etc.
I personally think it is good if openEHR can be used for systematizing data collection and making it easier to explore/improve evidence for different approaches to healthcare.
for the philosophical question, CKM and openEHR are objectively agnostic about allopathy and other kinds of medical approaches; what it is not agnostic about is a general scientific method approach, sometimes known as a hypothetico-deductive approach. Big words, but all they mean is that openEHR does predispose the content models to at least some sort of observation / diagnostic / intervention cycle. From my limited knowledge of Ayurveda, I don’t think there are incompatabilities - the theoretical methods are just different, i.e. what kind of observations, how diagnosis is made and so on are different.
The one thing that is needed for things like Ayurvedic archetypes to co-exist with mainstream western medicine ones is that naming is done carefully so that no basic terms are confused. For example, there is an archetype known as ‘problem/diagnosis’. The unwritten assumption is that this is to do with western medicine. Whether it is re-usable for Ayrvedic healing I don’t know, but let’s assume it isn’t. So you will want to create a problem/diagnosis archetype(s) for Ayurveda, and to avoid name clashes, it will need an id like ayurvedic_problem_diagnosis or similar. The same goes for any other potentially clashing content areas.
It might seem unfair that western medicine is the default concept space, just as English language is the default in archetype ids (not elsewhere though), but in the end they are all just ids. As long as we know what they mean, everyone will be happy.
The same arguments apply to naturopathy and so on.