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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.
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.

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.

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 concept system was not developed in isolation, and a conformant model inherits its connections:

ISO 13606-1:2019 — Electronic health record communication. The model's record concepts are related to the ISO 13606 reference model — including its folder, composition, and entry structures — showing how a conceptual model can be carried into implementable record communication, while remaining general enough to accommodate non-electronic records.
HL7 FHIR. Terminology in the standard has been aligned with FHIR, so mapping the model's concepts onto FHIR resources and APIs starts from agreement rather than translation.
ISO/IEC 21838 (top-level ontologies). The DOLCE alignment described in Alignment with the DOLCE upper ontology ties the model to the international framework for top-level ontologies.
ISO 24156-1 — UML notation for concept modelling. The model's diagrams follow standard terminology-work notation, so they are readable by any practitioner familiar with the convention and unambiguous about being concept models rather than data schemas.
Service architecture standards. Where organisations standardise the care processes themselves — for example through the ISO 12967 health informatics service architecture — the concept system supplies the vocabulary those process definitions are written in.

The practical consequence: adopting the conformant model does not add another competing vocabulary to the estate. It supplies the connective tissue between the standards already in use.