ClinicalTemplates.org

Background

A clinical template is a generic term for a collection of data items structured to be useful for a health care application. They contribute to three important goals of eHealth:

• managing and improving the clinical content of systems as a valuable stand-alone resource
• specifying the information requirements of clinical care
• implementing information standards for system interoperability (exchanging and processing data between systems)

A template describes the information in, for example, a pain assessment. So it would list items like the character of the pain, its location, intensity, duration and describe the data that could be entered for each item.

More specific terms which relate to particular information standards are:

• ISO TS 13972 Health Informatics - Detailed Clinical Models characteristics and processes
• openEHR Archetypes & Clinical Templates
• HL7 Detailed Clinical Models
• See also the Clinical Information Modelling Initiative (CIMI) which aims to reconcile differences in formats between the existing standards.

The Clinical Template project offers a web 'shell’ for a collaborative project site, supporting groups, membership, news, blogs, newsfeeds, and wiki. Within that, we offer a range of plugins to support template building, mappings and other project-specific tools.

In various projects using the framework, we have developed code to import openEHR archetypes/templates, ISO 13606 archetypes, and UML-based Detailed Clinical Models.

Results 4 Care offers additional tooling, the DCM Model Creator, to create the UML based DCMs, that meet the current ISO TS 13972 requirements.

This Results 4 Care Model Creator imports the XML from clinical templates (as wel as other formats) and exports it into OpenEHR and CIMI ADL, HL7 v3, HL7 FHIR, CSV, and other formats upon request.

Source code

The source uses a BSD licence, one of the most liberal, and means you can modify and use the code for anything you like, including commercial projects. We hope that if you do use the code, you will let us know about your project, and consider forking the code and contributing improvements.

Ct-snowhite is a sample Django project which installs and uses the main components of the framework into a working system. Django is full-featured web framework written in Python.

It is recommended you install this into a working Django setup using Virtualenv- you can then clone the project with Git and do a pip install:

Please refer to the contact provided below to get a copy of the materials.

Projects using the framework

• Results4Care Detailed Clinical Models
• Liver Transplant Surgery for Sardegna Ricerche, delivered in partnership with Ocean Informatics
• In the past the NHS Scotland feasibility study into clinical templates as a national resource
• In the past: the ongoing International Classification for Nursing Practice project of ICN

Similar project

• Derek Hoy established other web-based resources, such as ALISS (“A Local Information System for Scotland”). ALISS is a collaboratively maintained index of community assets. This site is founded on a similar principle to clinical templates - working together online as a community. ALISS supports collaboration between patients, their informal carers, and health and social care professionals. See the Scotsman for a short article on ALISS, and ALISS.org for the site. 

Authors

Snowcloud was a partnership formed by Derek Hoy and Nick Hardiker. Unfortunately Derek passed away in 2012. We have great memories of him and some of these are available on his obituary sites. The management of clinicaltemplates.org is currently handled by Results 4 Care.

Memories of Derek Hoy and his great work in health informatics

Contact

William Goossen (DCMHelpdesk@results4care.eu)

Results 4 Care

get the source code via the above email address