Why we need a large-scale open metadata initiative in health informatics - a vision paper on open data models for clinical phenotypes.

Clinical phenotypes are very complex and not well described. For instance, more than 100.000 biomedical concepts are needed to describe clinical properties of patients. At present, information systems dealing with clinical phenotype data are based on secret, heterogeneous and incompatible data models. This is the root cause for the well-known grand challenge of semantic interoperability in healthcare: data exchange and analysis of medical information systems has major limitations. This problem slows down medical progressand wastes time of health care professionals. A large-scale open metadata initiative can foster exchange, discussion and consensus regarding data models for clinical phenotypes. This would be an important contribution to improve information systems in healthcare and to solve the grand challenge of semantic interoperability.