Aim of the project
The Archetype Companion was developed during my openEHR Fellowship with the aim of making the modelling process more accessible and structured. Clinical modellers often face a daunting task: navigating hundreds of archetypes across the international CKM, understanding how they relate to each other, and planning which ones to reuse, adapt, or create from scratch for a new template. The goal of this project is to provide a lightweight web-based tool that guides modellers through this journey, from a list of clinical data elements all the way to a well-structured template plan.
What makes it special
What sets the Archetype Companion apart is that it approaches the modelling challenge from the modeller’s perspective, not the repository’s. Instead of browsing the CKM page by page, users get fast search, dependency visualization (parent-child relationships, exclusions, inclusions), and recommendations of related archetypes. This is powered by an automated backend that periodically parses the international CKM into a structured dictionary. Modellers can build and manage archetype collections, create placeholders for archetypes that don’t yet exist, and organize everything as a project. It’s designed to complement existing tools, not replace them. It’s available for anyone in the community to use and build upon.
The Archetype Companion can be accessed here:
The full project documentation can be accessed here:
The full PDF report on this project can be downloaded here:
Side-projects that have been a result of this fellowship project
After ending the fellowship I was still rumbling on about archetypes, the reference model and modelling patterns. So I went on to publish two related things:
openEHR RM browser
A browser of the openEHR specifications:
Archetype inclusion patterns
A webpage that shows common modelling patterns. BASically it helps to see which archetypres are “normally” inserted in other archetypes:
https://martinkochdesign.github.io/openEHR_archetype_inclusion_patterns/