EHR Server at University College London

The Centre of Health Informatics and Multiprofessional Education (CHIME), part of University College London, has been active in several EU projects over the past decade on the requirements, specification, implementation and evaluation of EHR systems and middleware services. These European Commission sponsored projects include GEHR, Synapses, EHCR-SupA, SynEx, Medicate and 6WINIT.

Deployments

Over the past five years this EHR research team has implemented a component-based federated EHR server drawing on those R&D results, and piloted its live use at the Whittington Hospital in north London. The research underpinning and technical approach of this work, including the use of archetypes, is described in the following reprint of a paper published in Toward an Electronic Health Record Europe (TEHRE) 2001. The reference and archetype information models used in this implementation work are given in a technical appendix to this paper.

The CHIME UCL server was deployed as part of the NHS Electronic Record Demonstration and Implementation Programme (ERDIP) in South West Devon.

Background

A comprehensive review of the field and the UCL demonstrator is contained in Dipak Kalra's PhD Thesis (45MB).

The Java middleware components described in these papers are intended for open source, to be licensed through openEHR on this site, during 2004-5.

The demonstration described here has benefited from extensive collaboration within several European project consortia, the results of which have been piloted in many other health care settings as illustrated in the map.

This practical implementation and demonstration, building on a long and iterative R&D journey, has been a principal feed into the present version of the openEHR specifications, drafted jointly with our colleagues from Ocean Informatics. UCL is, with them, also contributing to the CEN EHRcom Task Force.

The UCL team is a partner in the Medical Research Council e-Science project CLEF, developing a large-scale anonymised EHR repository of cancer records with access for biomedical and genomics research, via the Grid.

Future

The EHR server will be redeveloped during 2004/5, building on the latest openEHR specifications and the early proposals from EHRcom, and to evaluate these in live clinical settings during 2005.