Archetypes: the PropeR way

The PropeR project studies the effect of Decision Support in an Electronic Health Record system (EHR) on the quality of care. One of the applications supports a multidisciplinary primary care team rehabilitating stroke patients in their home environment. This project required an EHR system that could handle information of multiple disciplines and multiple, distributed data sources. It should also be flexible enough to handle an entirely different domain with only minor modifications. The resulting EHR system is a distributed system based on international standards and reusable components. It is generic in nature since all references to the domain are stored in separate XML documents: the clinical data are defined through a modified version of the OpenEHR archetypes, described in XML and views on the data, either for review or for data entry are also described in XML documents. Currently, the system is being evaluated by a care team using laptops with a wireless internet connection. The use of standards greatly improves the quality and reusability of the resulting software system, but they do not solve the issues that surface during implementation, such as context and screen representation.