Clinical Knowledge Governance Framework for Nationwide Data Infrastructure Projects

Background: The availability of semantically-enriched and interoperable clinical information models is crucial for reusing once collected data across institutions like aspired in the German HiGHmed project. Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, this nationwide data infrastructure project adopts the openEHR approach for semantic modelling. Here, strong governance is required to define high-quality and reusable models.

Objectives: Design of a clinical knowledge governance framework for openEHR modelling in cross-institutional settings like HiGHmed.

Methods: Analysis of successful practices from international projects, published ideas on archetype governance and own modelling experiences as well as modelling of BPMN processes.

Results: We designed a framework by presenting archetype variations, roles and responsibilities, IT support and modelling workflows.

Conclusion: Our framework has great potential to make the openEHR modelling efforts manageable. Because practical experiences are rare, prospectively our work will be predestinated to evaluate the benefits of such structured governance approaches.