openEHR
In short
openEHR is an open standard for storing and sharing health data. According to openEHR, its goal is a health record that stays with the patient for life and does not depend on any particular software. It separates the technical structure from the clinical content: health professionals define the clinical models and the software adapts to them.
- Type
- Reference model
- Steward
- openEHR International
- Current version
- RM 1.1.0
- Reviewed
- October 25, 2026
Explanation
What it is
openEHR is a technology made up of open specifications, clinical models and software for building electronic health record platforms. It is developed by openEHR International, a non-profit organization, and a global community of clinicians and engineers. The specifications are copyrighted by the openEHR Foundation and published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 licence.
Two-level modelling
openEHR separates the technical foundation from the clinical content:
| Layer | What it is |
|---|---|
| Reference model (RM) | A small, stable set of generic structures that every openEHR system shares |
| Archetypes | Reusable definitions of clinical concepts, such as a blood pressure reading or a medication order, built and reviewed by clinicians |
| Templates | Archetypes combined and tailored for a specific use, such as a discharge summary or an antenatal visit |
| Applications | Software built on templates, reading and writing data through a standard REST API and querying it with AQL |
The Archetype Query Language (AQL) lets you query data by its clinical meaning, without depending on a vendor's database schema.
Versions
As of October 2026, the stable version of the reference model is 1.1.0 (September 2020) and that of the REST API is 1.1.0 (July 2026). The conformance specifications are still in development.
Common misconceptions
- openEHR is not a product. It is a standard with open-source and commercial implementations.
- It does not compete with FHIR across the board: FHIR focuses on exchange and openEHR on long-term clinical persistence. Some projects combine both.
- Archetypes need governance. Without a clinical review process, each institution creates its own models and interoperability is lost.
- openEHR does not bring its own terminology for everything: models are bound to international and local terminologies.
- Units of quantities (
DV_QUANTITY) are expressed in UCUM by default.
Usage examples
The international openEHR Clinical Knowledge Manager gathers archetypes built and reviewed by clinicians from many countries, published openly.
Norway has its own Clinical Knowledge Manager (arketyper.no) for developing and publishing openEHR archetypes, and openEHR has been adopted as the standard for clinical content in the Norwegian hospital sector.
According to a peer-reviewed article published in 2023 in the journal Digital Health, openEHR has been adopted as a national standard in India, Slovenia and Brazil.
In 2026, openEHR Switzerland and HL7 Switzerland formed a joint working group to document how to transform FHIR vaccination documents (CH VACD) into openEHR compositions and back.
The openEHR archetype formalism was adopted by the ISO 13606-2:2019 standard.
Relation to other terms
Relies on1
- UCUMMedium
The openEHR DV_QUANTITY type expresses units in UCUM syntax by default, although it allows another unit system.
Depend on this one0
No glossary term depends on this one.
Sources
- openEHR — Specificationsspecifications.openehr.org
- openEHR — Release baselinespecifications.openehr.org
- openEHR — What is openEHR?openehr.org
- openEHR — EHR Information Model (RM Release-1.1.0, licencia)specifications.openehr.org
- openEHR — Data Types Information Model (DV_QUANTITY)specifications.openehr.org
- openEHR Norway — Clinical Knowledge Manager (arketyper.no)arketyper.no
- Digital Health (2023) — Open platform requirements and openEHRpmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- openEHR — From proof of concept to a reusable blueprint (Suiza, 2026)openehr.org