Business Archetypes and Archetype Patterns from the HL7 RIM and openEHR RM Perspectives: Towards Interoperability and Evolution of Healthcare Models and Software Systems

Business archetypes and archetype patterns were originally introduced by Arlow and Neustadt. Business archetype patterns (Product, Party, Order, Inventory, Quantity and Rule), composed of business archetypes (e.g., Person's Name, Address, Phone Number) are the universal information models describing the universe of discourse of businesses. We have redesigned these archetypes and archetype patterns and are using the redesigned version of archetypes and archetype patterns in the development of real life healthcare software. In this paper we compare the redesigned archetypes and archetype patterns with the HL7 Version 3: Reference Information Model and openEHR Reference Model. In our comparison we emphasize semantical aggregation of health data across heterogeneous data sources, as well as the interoperability and evolution of models and software.