Integration of tools for binding archetypes to SNOMED CT

Background The Archetype formalism and the associated Archetype Definition Language have been proposed as an ISO standard for specifying models of components of electronic healthcare records as a means of achieving interoperability between clinical systems. This paper presents an archetype editor with support for manual or semi-automatic creation of bindings between archetypes and terminology systems. Methods Lexical and semantic methods are applied in order to obtain automatic mapping suggestions. Information visualisation methods are also used to assist the user in exploration and selection of mappings. Results An integrated tool for archetype authoring, semi-automatic SNOMED CT terminology binding assistance and terminology visualization was created and released as open source. Conclusion Finding the right terms to bind is a difficult task but the effort to achieve terminology bindings may be reduced with the help of the described approach. The methods and tools presented are general, but here only bindings between SNOMED CT and archetypes based on the openEHR reference model are presented in detail.