Openness was the theme of an OpenEHR event as healthcare professionals gathered to debate the benefits of having a more flexible electronic health record.
OpenEHR day, held in London on 28 October, was kicked off by Dr Ian McNicol, clinical co-chair of the INTEROPen Board.
Speaking at the Skills Matter venue in Moorgate, McNicol explained that openEHR was a “new way of building health IT software”.
OpenEHR is defined as a solution capable of supporting an open platform ecosystem that is technology and vendor-neutral.
Adding on this, Tomaž Gornik, co-chair of the openEHR Foundation, said the perfect health IT scenario would be to “have clinical people build the model and the IT people build the software”.
Summarising, he said “healthcare is changing and today’s monolithic applications can’t cope”.
Looking towards the future, Gornik said he believed it would be a “multi-vendor” landscape, meaning “vendor-neutral health data” would be a “key asset”.
He added: “OpenEHR provides a proven platform to build new innovative applications”.
Another speaker on the day was Andrew Forest, CIO of Taunton and Somerset NHS Trust.
The trust is a Global Digital Exemplar (GDE), NHS England’s flagship programme which aims to create a group of reference sites for NHS digitisation that provide standardised blueprints for other trusts to follow.
Forest was questioned on ensuring the success of openEHR is shared with others as part of the blueprinting process.
In response, he said the trust was “doing something different and learning the lessons of openEHR”, confirming that it had the intention to open up the blueprints and share what it had learnt.
On the topic of engagement, Forest said the trust wanted to be “very open with citizens” on the a number of subjects, especially data.
He added: “We spent a lot of time out in the town centres and around the clinics, talking to people about what we are going to do with their data.”
The aim of the day was to provide an introduction to openEHR through speakers talking about their experience with the platform, its implementation, the scale of opportunity, and vision for its capabilities to facilitate interoperability in healthcare.
30 October 2019 @ 14:43
There was encourging progress with open platforms and openEHR demonstrated at this meeting. A few key points that aren’t clear in the report above.
1) The clear endorsement of open platforms and the key role of openEHR in such platforms from speakers from the leading consultancies Gartner and EY. They were clear that the meagsuites can’t deliver the data fluidity needed for future digital health.
2) The clear message from a number of speakers that openEHR and FHIR are complementary and not in competition, each playing a different role in creating an open platform ecosystem. The need to ensure that the underlying semantics of openEHR and FHIR are aligned was recognised as key to ensuring maximum interoperability.
3) Adoption is happening with a national open platform in Scotland based on openEHR and similar developments in Malta, Sardinia and Finland joining those longer established implementations in Moscow, Slovenia, Germany and Norway. With all of these dwarfed by developments in China where 100’s of hospital and clinics are now using openEHR
29 October 2019 @ 09:36
Having attended this same event two years ago it was really encouraging to see that openEHR is really gaining momentum in all markets outside of the United States. It was also really interesting to see a common theme from suppliers who are looking to combine openEHR with FHIR in order to integrate with legacy systems. What is really needed now is more openEHR apps. Any SME thinking of developing an app should seriously consider developing in openEHR in order to exploit the new opportunities arising e.g,. the national digital platform in Scotland. Viva la revolucion!