About EHRbase

EHRbase helps software companies to reduce their development costs for next generation applications. EHRbase provides an openly specified and vendor-neutral software backend for clinical application systems and electronic health records. The underlying openEHR specification powers the most comprehensive use cases, including hospital information systems and national eHealth backbones.

EHRbase does the heavy lifting: clinical semantics, versioning, model-based software development, a standardised REST API, an adaptive database model, automated data validation, model-based querying (using the Archetype Query Language), transaction management and more.

EHRbase allows companies to embrace open standards while saving significant development costs.

Today, most hospital data is still locked in proprietary databases. As data lock-in is part of many vendors’ business models, communication interfaces are rare and data migration is very expensive. While data is becoming an increasingly important asset, current legacy systems hinder the efficient and intelligent use of data.

EHRbase enables hospitals to enhance the capabilities of their monolithic electronic medical record (EMR) by introducing a bi-model approach to health IT. The traditional EMR is complemented by a vendor-neutral and open clinical data repository that allows in-house development teams and industry partners to build innovative data-driven solutions for the hospital. Every single data element within the EMR can be securely accessed and processed through an open application programming interface.

Since the data is stored in an open format, vendor and data lock-in are prevented.

Providing citizens with a lifelong electronic health record is the primary goal of most eHealth programs. If data is not only to be transferred between organisations, but actively used to improve cross-sectoral care processes (e.g. by implementing electronic guidelines or collecting patient-reported outcomes) and to provide insights through data analytics, an open platform approach is needed. Not only for these reasons, regions and countries such as Catalonia, Scotland, Finland, Slovenia and Malta are implementing nationwide electronic health records based on openEHR.

EHRbase provides a solid foundation for the challenging task of large-scale infrastructure, giving governments full control over the data models and the procurement process: since EHRbase is based on openEHR, switching a substantial part of a nation’s underlying eHealth infrastructure becomes a feasible option.

Large research organisations, such as university hospitals face major challenges in efficiently using the enormous amount of data from care and research for analytics. Furthermore, collaboration in research networks requires organisations to make data FAIR: findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.

EHRbase helps organisations to integrate and normalise data from care and research, provide reusable and machine-readable information models (through openEHR Archetypes and Templates) and make the data queryable and accessible through the Archetype Query Language and open application programming interfaces.

The value of EHRbase as a research platform grows over time as research databases and clinical registries are natively developed based on openEHR, reusing standardised data models.

As openEHR provides a rich description of the data and is machine-readable, automated transformations to formalisms and tools such as OMOP and i2b2/tranSMART are feasible.