ISO 13606-2:2008 specifies the information architecture required for interoperable communications between systems and services that need or provide EHR data. ISO 13606-2:2008 is not intended to specify the internal architecture or database design of such systems.

The subject of the record or record extract to be communicated is an individual person, and the scope of the communication is predominantly with respect to that person's care.

Uses of healthcare records for other purposes such as administration, management, research and epidemiology, which require aggregations of individual people's records, are not the focus of ISO 13606-2:2008 but such secondary uses could also find this docuement useful.

ISO 13606-2:2008 defines an archetype model to be used to represent archetypes when communicated between repositories, and between archetype services. It defines an optional serialized representation, which may be used as an exchange format for communicating individual archetypes. Such communication might, for example, be between archetype libraries or between an archetype service and an EHR persistence or validation service.