EN ISO 13940:2016 PDF

Overview

EN ISO 13940:2016 (ISO 13940:2015) - "Health informatics - System of concepts to support continuity of care" defines a system of high-level concepts for healthcare delivery. It frames the core business of healthcare as interactions between subjects of care and healthcare professionals, framed as healthcare/clinical processes. The standard provides concept definitions and concept models for clinical, management and resource aspects of healthcare services and is intended for use at the conceptual (not implementation) level. Its purpose is to support structured information specifications and a common semantic basis across national, local and international systems.

Key topics

• Concept system for continuity of care: conceptual definitions that span actors, matters, activities, processes, planning and time to represent clinical content and context.
• Actors: concepts for subjects of care, healthcare providers, next of kin and third parties.
• Healthcare matters: health issue, observed and potential conditions, health state and related constructs used to record and reason about a person’s health.
• Activities and resources: definitions for healthcare activities (provider, self-care, third‑party, automated), resources and funds.
• Process and planning: clinical process model, care plans (uni‑ and multi‑professional, core plans), clinical guidelines, goals and activity bundles.
• Information and responsibility: conceptual approaches to information management, time, responsibility and process management to enable traceable clinical workflows.
• Semantic interoperability focus: intended as a conceptual foundation for logical reference models within the information viewpoint and for consistent information specifications.

Note: the standard articulates conceptual definitions only and does not prescribe implementation details.

Applications

EN ISO 13940 is useful wherever structured healthcare information or consistent clinical semantics are required:

• EHR / electronic health record design - to align clinical data models with a shared conceptual framework.
• Health information exchange and interoperability - as a semantic reference when defining APIs, mappings and exchange formats.
• Clinical modelling and terminology work - to guide design of information models, archetypes or templates used in clinical systems.
• Care planning and quality management - to standardize care plan components, goals and process descriptions.
• Policy, procurement and integration projects - to specify requirements for systems that must support continuity of care across organisations.

Primary users: health informatics architects, EHR vendors, system integrators, clinical informaticians, terminologists, standards teams and healthcare IT procurement officers.

Related standards

EN ISO 13940 was prepared by ISO/TC 215 in collaboration with CEN/TC 251 and is intended to complement other health informatics standards and terminologies by providing a conceptual semantic backbone for continuity of care and information viewpoints.