This document specifies a means for communicating part or all of the electronic health record (EHR) of one or more identified subjects of care between EHR systems, or between EHR systems and a centralised EHR data repository.

It can also be used for EHR communication between an EHR system or repository and clinical applications or middleware components (such as decision support components), or personal health applications and devices, that need to access or provide EHR data, or as the representation of EHR data within a distributed (federated) record system.

This document defines term lists that each specify the set of values for the particular attributes of the Reference Model defined in ISO 13606-1. It also defines normative and informative Reference Archetypes that enable frequently-occurring instances of EHR data to be represented within a consistent structure when communicated using this document.