The medical specialties have not yet broadly organized to define the consistent roles and the structure of functions and data needed within each specialty discipline. Nevertheless, the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) has organized an effort directed at the EHR and a website to describe their projects. As of January 2004 several efforts are underway to document a taxonomy of functions to be supported by the EHR, many of which have been noted in ASTM standards for the structure and content of the EHR. It is clear that various specialty  “View” documents will need to be developed to point out how the generic data structures and vocabularies support each particular specialty’s conceptual support  needs. The Basic Patient Care Scenario given in ASTM 1384 and the associated general data structures provide the core of the information needed by all health care specialties. The functions that use that data and the presentation of that information is still in the early stages of a full description needed to support the Life Cycle of an EHR System from and Enterprise viewpoint. The other pages on this website have begun to address various aspects of those needs. There are major differences in perspective between resident (inpatient) and ambulatory settings. The AAFP web site provides an overview of some of these differences.