Michael Anywar, a digital health specialist with expertise in openEHR, FHIR, and health data interoperability, has been developing a set of tools that address one of the most persistent challenges in digital health interoperability: turning clinically relevant openEHR data into usable, standards-based outputs, currently FHIR and CSV.
While officially based in Germany, Michael has engaged with several European health data initiatives, all while continuing his PhD in Healthcare Technologies at Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia. Through this combination of academic research and practical experience, he recognised a recurring limitation in existing integration tools: lack of flexibility, especially when small, use-case specific data subsets are required.
“I have spent years asking vendors for features that never came,” he recalls. “Eventually, I decided to build them myself.”
This hands-on approach led to the development of two open-source tools: ALUR and CohortMailer both licensed under MIT and freely available to the community.
What makes these tools different?
ALUR, short for AQL-based Logical Unified Routing Engine, leverages Archetype Query Language (AQL) to extract precisely the required clinical data from openEHR repositories, transform it into FHIR format, and transmit it onward. The system is modular, supports custom mappings, and handles advanced FHIR features such as extensions, something many current tools lack.
“openEHR has many fields that FHIR can’t represent directly,” Michael explains. “That’s where FHIR extensions come in, but current tools don’t support it. This one does.”
The name ALUR carries layered meaning. In some East Asian linguistic contexts, such as Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian), the word alur refers to a process or flow, a fitting metaphor for how the tool orchestrates data movement from source to target. At the same time, Alur is also the name of Michael’s own tribe in northern Uganda, grounding the tool in his personal heritage and a commitment to continuity both cultural and technical.
Complementing ALUR is CohortMailer, an automation utility that continuously queries clinical data repositories for defined patient cohorts and delivers tailored extracts to relevant stakeholders, researchers, compliance officers, or clinicians in a secure and scheduled manner.
“It runs automatically via scheduled triggers or cron jobs, filters data based on predefined logic, and sends the output to the right recipients in clean, ready-to-analyse CSV format.”
Looking ahead
Future development will focus on usability and integration. While both ALUR and CohortMailer currently run as independent backend services, plans are underway to add user-friendly interfaces, merge the tools and expand configuration options.
Michael remains active in the openEHR community as a member and continues to share his work across professional and academic networks.
“There’s still more to build. More to improve, making it more user-friendly is high on the list. But we’re getting closer to making high-quality data integration accessible to everyone.”
He’s also open to speaking opportunities – October’s openEHR Conference in Barcelona is on the cards.
Both tools are available on Github under the MIT license and can be freely used, modified and integrated by the community.
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