Thomas Beale (CTO of Ocean Informatics and chair of the Architecture Review Board of the openEHR Foundation) posted these two paragraphs as part of the background for his recent Woland's Cat post - The Null Flavour debate - part I. It is an important statement that I don't want to get lost amongst other discussion, so I've reposted it here:
An initial comment I will make is that there is a notion that openEHR is ‘about defining systems’ whereas HL7 ‘is about interoperability’. This is incorrect. openEHR is primarily about solving the information interoperability problem in health, and it addresses all information, regardless of whether it is inside a system or in a message. (It does define some reference model semantics specific to the notion of ‘storing information’, mainly around versioning and auditing, but this has nothing to do with the main interoperability emphasis.)
To see that openEHR is about generalised interoperability, all that is needed is to consider a lab archetype such as Lipid studies in the Clinical Knowledge Manager. This archetype defines a possible structure of a Lipids lab test result, in terms of basic information model primitives (Entry, History, Cluster, Element etc). In the openEHR approach, we use this same model as the formal definition of this kind of information is in a message travelling ‘between systems’, in a database or on the screen within a ‘system’. This is one of the great benefits of openEHR: messages are not done differently from everything else. Neither is interoperability of data in messages between systems different from that of data between applications or other parts of a ‘system’.