After studying the openEHR demographic model, I am stuck now in the section about demographic relationships. Until now my objective for incorporating family relationships into the EHR was to add an interface at the family history archetype, i.e. in the Evaluation Concept for Family History. However it seems to me that I have two possibilities representing family relationships, either through the Family History archetype (inside the EHR) or through the demographic model (outside the EHR). I can see the problem of incorporating relationships into the Family History archetype, which is that not all subjects of care will have this archetyped information stored in their EHR. For the other approach through the demographic model, all subject entities can be linked with each other representing - as you indicate in the section - a family network, depending on the implementation of the model.
My question: Do you also see this two possiblities for family relationships? How would the reference model being used for interpatient relationships? A third way, however would be to create another archetype, which supplies the concepts for inter-family relationships, even the family members do not yet have a problem....
Any thoughts on thgis topic are highly appreciated.
We are working with others to develop a strong demographic model. I
personally believe that the links within the record should be via a
relationship only (mother, brother etc) - and strong links should only be in
the demographics - as there are less privacy issues here.
There will be a number of announcements coming up soon....there has been a lot of activity in the background, despite the lack of posts! We will get a "planning" page up in the next week or so containing deadlines for various milestones, including the 0.9 release. I won't pre-empt this too much, but interesting things that have been going on in the last few months include:
- the DSTC and a group at the University of South Australia have been working on the openEHR INSTRUCTION ENTRY type, and related workflow models
- Ocean Informatics has been working on an archetype language (Archetype Definition Language - ADL), including tools
- a lot of work has been going on in the standards cycle, particularly on the CEN ENV 13606 revision, which various openEHR people are involved in.
- a formal change request and problem reporting mechanism is being put in place