FhirStore vs OpenEHR

[FLeen]

Hi, We're investigating the Google HC API and a question that keeps coming up that I'm unable to answer:-

What are the reasons that Google (and AWS and Azure) choose to create 'FHIRStores' rather than use OpenEHR, which is designed for storage, whereas FHIR is not?

[Erik Willsey]

I struggled with this for a bit as well.  I think the answer here is that these products are not attempting to provide a data persistent layer similar to an EHR.  Instead, they are providing a datastore which serves as the primary layer for integration.  That implicitly requires that it have some sort of data structures, but also means it should use a structure focused on interoperability.  OpenEHR focuses on the software operations data structures for a relational database, whereas FHIR focuses on the ability to distribute those transactions based on data contracts.  If they were to leverage an OpenEHR ERD then it would not support the integration capabilities, because it's not based on event-driven data contracts.