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One model, one language for joined-up care
Explore the shared language of health and care: every concept, relationship, and diagram of a model conformant to ISO 13940:2026.
General terms
The foundational terms that recur throughout the model — care, health, party, role, resource, and the concepts of knowledge, information, and data.

One model, one language for joined-up care
Explore the shared language of health and care: every concept, relationship, and diagram of a model conformant to ISO 13940:2026.
- About ISO 13940:2026 (ContSys)
  ISO 13940:2026 is the second edition of the international standard defining the system of concepts needed to describe health and care businesses and to support continuity of care across clinical and social settings.
- The role of a conformant model
  A model conformant to ISO 13940 acts as the shared semantic foundation on which information systems, integration programmes, service specifications, and analyses are built — the fixed point that keeps them all saying the same thing.
- Illustrative use cases
  Three worked scenarios showing the conformant model doing its job: carrying meaning intact across a discharge, a referral, and the secondary use of care data.
- Continuity of care: the organising goal
  Continuity of care is what the concept system exists to protect: the ability of a subject of care to move between services, organisations, and sectors without losing the thread of their care.
- Social care as a first-class citizen
  The second edition of ISO 13940 is the product of extensive international work to bring social care fully inside the concept system, so that integrated care can be modelled — and delivered — without a semantic seam between sectors.
- Alignment with the DOLCE upper ontology
  Every upper-level concept in the model is aligned with DOLCE — the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering standardised in ISO/IEC 21838-3:2023 — giving the concept system a formally validated backbone.
- How the model fits the wider standards estate
  Conformance to ISO 13940 brings built-in coherence with the record, terminology, and architecture standards a modern care system already depends on.
- The master diagrams
  The full-size master diagrams behind ISO 13940:2026: the architecture of the concept areas, the activities of a continuity of care process, and the DOLCE alignment, drawn in UML notation following ISO 24156-1.
- General terms
  The foundational terms that recur throughout the model — care, health, party, role, resource, and the concepts of knowledge, information, and data.
  - knowledge
    maintained, processed, and interpreted information
  - health
    state of complete physical, mental and social well-being
  - information
    meaningful data
  - party
    person or group performing a role in relation to the business of a specific community or domain
  - process model
    representation of a process
  - continuity of care
    coherent and interconnected series of care events over time
  - event
    situation considered to occur at a time point
  - appointment
    arrangement to meet someone at a particular time and place
  - mandate
    commission to act
  - person
    individual human being
  - commitment
    obligation by one or more of the participants in an act to comply with a rule or perform a contract
  - organization
    person or group of people that has its own functions with responsibilities, authorities and relationships to achieve its objectives
  - resource
    asset that is utilized or consumed during the execution of activities
  - social determinant of health
    condition in which a subject of care is born, grows, lives, works and ages including their access to power, money and resources
  - risk
    combination of the probability of occurrence of harm and the severity of that harm
  - data
    set of values of qualitative or quantitative variables
  - data repository
    identifiable data storage facility
  - information model
    formal model of a bounded set of facts, concepts or instructions to meet a specified requirement
  - care
    provision of accommodations, comfort and treatment to an individual subject of care
  - role
    set of competencies or performances, or both, that are associated with a task

General terms

The foundational terms that recur throughout the model — care, health, party, role, resource, and the concepts of knowledge, information, and data.

These are the general concepts on which every other area builds: care and health themselves, the parties — persons and organizations — and the roles they play, the resources they use, the risks they manage, and the knowledge, information, and data that connect them.