The ultimate end‐point of healthcare and health‐related life sciences, more or less as regulatory idea, is the prevention and cure of diseases, considering the fate of individual patients as well as the challenge of providing sufficient care for all. However, all undertakings stand under the “proviso of rightness of action”. The movement of evidence‐based medicine has triggered a renaissance of systematic self‐assurance of best practise.

The systematic utilization of healthcare records and research study recordings in an inter‐linked manner provides a better enabling environment to improve evidence. Good e‐health must contribute to accumulate inter‐generation clinical experience. Qualified research should ensure methodological strictness via gold standards like controlled, randomised and masked trials.

Building information systems for e‐health as well as for e‐science bears as a special focus the mutual cross‐fertilization of these application domains. Analysing a variety of building blocks shows that both areas can benefit from generic solution pattern, keeping in mind that each domain has distinguished knowledge realms. Generic patterns as well as distinguished special features are illustrated by analysing state of the art solutions plus some experimental approaches, as there are: the generic part of the HL7 V3 RIM, the RCRIM work, laboratory information handling, vital sign standardization efforts, like ECG information models.

Finally, the precision of the usage of the ubiquitous term “metadata” is taken as example of an open issue.