SNOMED International is pleased to announce a five-year collaboration agreement with openEHR, a non-profit initiative that develops open standards for electronic health records (EHRs) to improve data interoperability, management, and reuse.
openEHR, an international organization, uses an archetype-based modeling approach, enabling clinicians to define EHR content independently of software. By fostering semantic interoperability, openEHR ensures health information can be exchanged and understood across systems, reducing vendor lock-in and enhancing adaptability. Its open, community-driven specifications – encompassing a reference model, archetypes, templates, and APIs – are widely adopted in national EHR systems and specialized healthcare applications globally.
Both organizations are members of the Joint Initiative Council for Global Health Informatics Standardization. openEHR, like SNOMED International, also collaborates with European data standards bodies, as well as with HL7 International and CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency.
The collaboration responds to a need the openEHR community has identified to include SNOMED CT in openEHR archetypes and to ensure users of those archetypes employ an international terminology standard for interoperability and SNOMED CT. The collaboration will also facilitate the ability to represent clinical content consistently and enable openEHR to develop and include SNOMED CT concepts and codes associated with openEHR archetypes.
Member-driven
Many SNOMED International Members that use openEHR will benefit from this collaboration, so a formal collaboration with openEHR is useful so that SNOMED CT can serve as the terminology within this and other related archetypes.
For example, Ireland is implementing openEHR for their shared care record architecture, which is designed to facilitate secure and structured access to patients' digital health information across the healthcare system. This architecture supports transition of care, allowing clinicians, patients, and carers to access existing health data effectively.
Additionally, Jamaica uses openEHR for vaccination and lab tests; this collaboration will facilitate the ability to use a SNOMED CT terminology post-coordination approach with the integration of openEHR. And finally, the use of openEHR within the research community has been well established and use cases for research in countries such as Germany will find this collaboration beneficial in their research efforts.
“I am delighted for the SNOMED International and openEHR community to be working together,” says openEHR CEO Rachel Dunscombe. “It is an opportunity for us to make our standards more complementary and simpler for health systems globally to implement together. The openEHR community very much looks forward to the benefits this partnership will add for healthcare systems.”
SNOMED CT, the most comprehensive, multilingual clinical healthcare terminology in the world, is a resource with comprehensive, scientifically validated clinical content. Used in more than 80 countries, it enables consistent representation of clinical content in electronic health records and is mapped to other international standards
Collaboration goals
The scope of work to be undertaken collaboratively is to permit the use of SNOMED CT with openEHR archetypes. This collaboration will help to ensure that where the SNOMED CT content is used within the openEHR solution, it meets SNOMED CT implementation best practices.
As part of the collaboration, the two organizations will produce a jointly agreed upon two-year work plan with deliverables to benefit both organizations and stakeholders. The work, which will focus on terminology services and terminology bindings in openEHR archetypes where SNOMED CT is used, will include the establishment of a collaborative community working group, which will jointly pursue opportunities for alignment with other health information technology standards organizations. The group may also develop an implementation guide.
“Establishing a collaboration with openEHR was a logical step,” says SNOMED International CEO Don Sweete, who presented at openEHR’s first annual conference in 2024. “It is consistent with our efforts to make it easier for implementers using multiple terminologies and with our work to make SNOMED CT more sustainable in the long term by integrating with other health data standards.”
Contacts:
openEHR - Pete Bouvier <PR@openehr.org>
SNOMED International <comms@snomed.org>