The HiGHmed approach for FAIR use of clinical and research data with openEHR – Focusing on interoperability

Authors: Sarah Nee & Michael Marschollek, Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics, TU Braunschweig and Hannover Medical School, Germany

Patient-centric medical research benefits from the sharing and integration of complex and diverse data from different sources such as care, clinical research, and novel emerging data types. The integration and use of the data is typically impeded by its diversity or even incompatibility in terms of quality, type, and format. To facilitate internationally interoperable data integration and methods, HiGHmed is developing a generic and scalable open health data platform. The architecture is based on relevant existing standards such as openEHR (an open standard specification for electronic health records) and the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) principles. The vendor- and technology-neutral standardized framework openEHR, ensures semantic interoperability of data with the separation of the data model from the content model through multi-level modeling.