Motivated by our experiences of representing clinical information using OWL DL, which often resulted in highly complex expressions, we propose the use of ontology content patterns to facilitate this task. They are based on a set of formal ontologies, constrained by the concepts and relations of a top-level one, which reduces arbitrariness in ontology design. We propose their application to information encoded by electronic health records specifications and ontology-based terminologies, in order to provide semantic interoperability across heterogeneously represented data, and to guide the creation of clinical models and detect semantic inconsistencies across them. We provide examples of their application to achieve the above mentioned tasks and discuss the limitations and further research issues.