Over the last few years the number of openEHR implementations, both commercial and research, has grown. There should now be a significant amount of experience with service interfaces, and it seems time to get moving on defining some openEHR standards for them.
In the interests of ‘starting small’, I would suggest that the EHR service is the best starting point. See here for one view of what this is, but even this description may change, as the world apparently progresses toward a more RESTful stateless architecture style.
In summary, one view of an ‘EHR service’ is the interface to the EHR data store: a place to put and retrieve EHRs. Obviously lots of other services are needed to build a whole solution (as described in the page above), but this one has a small interface and is not complicated to understand.
It seems reasonable to work towards a standard version by posting service definitions from existing systems / products, and following some discussion, to attempt to create a merged consensus version. Note: more than one service interface is ok! For example, a stateless REST style interface is just one approach; a stateful interface is just as valid for some purposes. Other flavours may also make sense.
As an example of an EHR service interface, the Ocean Informatics one is posted here, and is only about a dozen functions long.
It would be great to see some other service interfaces posted - please do that here - i.e. add an entry like the Ocean one, and then add a child page.
Once we get a feel for the diversity (or unanimity), we might be able to make some quick progress toward a proper openEHR EHR service.
- thomas beale