ISO 13606-3:2009 is for the communication of part or all of the electronic health record (EHR) of a single identified subject of care between EHR systems, or between EHR systems and a centralized EHR data repository. It may also be used for EHR communication between an EHR system or repository and clinical applications or middleware components (such as decision support components) that need to access or provide EHR data, or as the representation of EHR data within a distributed (federated) record system.

ISO 13606-3:2009 defines term lists that each specify the set of values that particular attributes of the Reference Model defined in ISO 13606-1 may take. It also defines informative Reference Archetypes that correspond to ENTRY-level compound data structures within the Reference Models of openEHR and HL7 Version 3, to enable those instances to be represented within a consistent structure when communicated using ISO 13606-3:2009.