Research on semantic consistency in openEHR modelling

General Discussion
1

Hi everyone,

I’d like to share and inform you about a line of work we’re currently developing.

I’m William Mensen, from the Digital Transformation research group at Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen. We’re convinced of the value of openEHR and have been doing some small openEHR projects like clinical modelling of radiotherapy and laboratory data, and using openEHR for secondary data use as a bridge between other standards, and we’re now trying to scale up. We’ve written a PhD proposal that I’d be carrying out, and I wanted to share the core problem and research direction here.

We found that there is a lack of semantic consistency between experts within the same medical specialism, radiotherapy in our case. The hard part turned out to be non-technical, even though openEHR is quite hard to get into, but specifically in reaching consensus with a large group of experts with various backgrounds. Different standards bodies, communities, and companies have developed ways to reach semantic consistency, but there is no clear blueprint yet.

The aim of the research project for which we are seeking funding is to develop a methodology that supports experts in achieving shared semantics and consensus. The project uses a design science approach, developing the methodology while also working on implementing or creating openEHR archetypes. The method for reaching semantic consistency and consensus can be broadly applied to other domains and even other standards.

We would like to share this more widely and find people to work with. If you have encountered similar issues, we would be glad to hear how you approached them, and we are very open to collaboration as the work develops.

A suggested category for the openEHR Discourse could be a research category, so we can share updates and follow each other’s progress.

Kind regards,
William Mensen
Lecturer-researcher
Hanze University of Applied Sciences

2

This is very interesting and I think openEHR has a really good story to tell around how best to try and engage broad clinical communities so try to reduce the amount of clinical variability, whilst still honouring the complexity of the space and an acceptance that not all variance is unwarranted. At the very least it is a conversation space.

Of course @heather.leslie can talk about the experience in SparkedAU and @Lars_Fuhrmann is doing a fantastic job of engaging the global ophthalmology community. However, I think there is definitely still room for improving the ways we communicate and present information to clinical communities, so experience from other standards development organisations.