Need EHR-to-Open-Standards Mapping (OMOP, openEHR, FHIR)
Iris and peers across Sweden are starting to ask the same question — how do we map raw vendor EHR records into open standards (OMOP, openEHR, FHIR) without doing it by hand for every region. She needs a declarative, reusable mapping layer that survives EHR vendor changes.
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Persona Story:
Iris is starting to see the same question pop up in Swedish healthcare circles: how do you map our vendor’s EHR format into OMOP for population research, into openEHR for cross-border patient data, into FHIR for US partner exchanges? Different regions use different EHR vendors and different internal conventions. Every region invents its own mapping spreadsheet. Some try to automate, some hire a consultancy, some do it by hand. Iris wants the mapping to live as a declarative, versioned artifact — readable by clinicians, reviewable by ethics committees, runnable in production — so the entire region (and ideally the country, and ideally Europe) can collaborate on it instead of re-doing it per-project.
Problem Context
- Vendor EHRs and open standards (OMOP, openEHR, FHIR) capture overlapping but mismatched fields, with different cardinalities and units
- Mapping is currently done per-project, often manually, often as a one-off spreadsheet that drifts as the source EHR ships updates
- Different research and clinical use cases want different target standards — population research → OMOP, cross-border care → openEHR, partner exchange → FHIR — from the same source EHR
- When the source vendor or the target standard changes, every downstream mapping has to be re-done
Problem Impact
- Healthcare research in Europe is bottlenecked by region-specific bespoke mapping work that doesn’t transfer across borders
- Mapping work is a hidden cost on every research, regulatory, or interoperability project that touches real EHR data
- Bespoke mappings rot — when the EHR vendor pushes a schema update, the mapping breaks silently and produces wrong cohorts
- Cross-region research collaborations carry the cost of reconciling everyone’s mapping conventions before the actual research can start
Naftiko Today
- Naftiko’s executable YAML capability spec is exactly a declarative, versioned, runnable mapping — vendor EHR record consumed → open-standard record exposed
- OutputParameters normalization handles unit conversions, cardinality reshaping, and field renaming declaratively
- JSON Schema validation enforces conformance to the target standard at the contract level, catching mapping regressions before production
- Capabilities are open source by default — a Region Halland mapping for Vendor X → OMOP is forkable by Region Skåne, Region Stockholm, anywhere
Naftiko Tomorrow
- OpenAPI-to-Naftiko import (Second Alpha) — pull a vendor’s EHR API or a standard’s spec into a capability scaffold automatically
- Reference mapping capabilities for major EHR vendors → FHIR/openEHR/OMOP (Second Alpha) — forkable starting points instead of greenfield work
- JSON Schema Store publication (GA) — published mappings are discoverable, versioned, and citation-ready
- Fabric capability discovery (v1.1) — a region searches for “Vendor X → openEHR” and finds peer regions’ work to fork, comment, or contribute back to
- Webhook adapter (Second Alpha) — when a vendor’s EHR changes, downstream consumers of the mapping can be notified declaratively