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Evidence note 16 Back to paper

openEHR and FHIR as complementary standards

Source for the openEHR and FHIR communities' shared framing that the two standards serve different layers of a clinical system.

Both the openEHR and FHIR implementer communities describe the two standards as complementary rather than competing: openEHR is positioned for deep, longitudinal clinical-data persistence and modeling, while FHIR is positioned as the exchange and interoperability layer between systems. This framing is not unique to one vendor’s marketing — it appears consistently across independent bridging-tool projects built by different organizations to connect the two.

Sources

  1. openFHIR, project site. An independent open-source tool for mapping between openEHR archetypes and FHIR resources, describing the complementary relationship as its design rationale.
  2. Better, “Introducing FHIR Connect”, Better blog. A commercial vendor’s articulation of the same complementary-layers framing.