This document specifies the information architecture required for interoperable communications between systems and services that need or provide EHR data. This document is not intended to specify the internal architecture or database design of such systems.

The subject of the record or record extract to be communicated is an individual person, and the scope of the communication is predominantly with respect to that person’s care.

Uses of healthcare records for other purposes such as administration, management, research and epidemiology, which require aggregations of individual people’s records, are not the focus of this document but such secondary uses could also find the document useful.

This document defines a set of interfaces to request and provide:

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  an EHR_EXTRACT for a given subject of care as defined in ISO 13606-1 ;

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  one or more ARCHETYPE(s) as defined in ISO 13606-2 ;

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  an EHR_AUDIT_LOG_EXTRACT for a given subject of care as defined in ISO 13606-4 .

This document defines the set of interactions to request each of these artefacts, and to provide the data to the requesting party or to decline the request. An interface to query an EHR or populations of EHRs, for example for clinical audit or research, are beyond its scope, although provision is made for certain selection criteria to be specified when requesting an EHR_EXTRACT which might also serve for population queries.

This document defines the Computational Viewpoint for each interface, without specifying or restricting particular engineering approaches to implementing these as messages or as service interfaces.

This document effectively defines the payload to be communicated at each interface. It does not specify the particular information that different transport protocols will additionally require, nor the security or authentication procedures that might be agreed between the communicating parties or required by different jurisdictions.