Framework for clinical data standardization based on archetypes.

Standardization of data is a prerequisite to achieve semantic interoperability in any domain. This is even more important in the healthcare sector where the need for exchanging health related data among professional and institutions is not an exception but the rule. Currently, there are several international organizations working on the definition of electronic health record architectures, some of them based on a dual-model approach. We present both an archetype modeling framework and LinkEHR-ED, an archetype editor and mapping tool for transforming existing electronic healthcare data which do not conform to a particular electronic healthcare record architecture into compliant electronic health records extracts. In particular, archetypes in LinkEHR-ED are formal representations of clinical concepts built on a particular reference model but enriched with mapping information to data sources which define how to extract and transform existing data in order to generate standardized XML documents.