The clinical program focuses on the development and publication of archetypes, templates, terminology subsets, and guidelines for healthcare IT. This includes creating clinical models, reusable queries, and clinical process plans, as well as engaging in clinical implementation projects.
The program falls under the remit of the Clinical Program Board (CPB), which is created from public nominations and addresses issues including methodology, modelling, dissemination, and monitoring the use of openEHR in the field.
The openEHR clinical program is governed according to its Terms of Reference.
The openEHR clinical program focuses on development of healthcare domain knowledge artefacts, including archetypes (data points and data groups), templates (data sets) and terminology subsets. These are freely available via the web-based Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM). The work has proceeded under the governance of a Clinical Models Editorial Group.
Clinical Program Board
Paul Miller
Co-Chair
Paul Miller
Co-Chair
Paul is a General Practitioner and Clinical Informatician. He is also the Clinical informatics lead for the NHS Scotland National Digital Platform and is involved in managing the clinical models for the platform data and in educating the team on openEHR. Other areas of interest include clinical safety assessments, clinical terminologies and interoperability.
Vanessa Pereira
Co-Chair
Vanessa Pereira
Co-Chair
Vanessa has a B.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from Polytechnic of Porto – School of Engineering (ISEP) and holds an M.Sc. in Medical informatics from the Faculty of Medicine of University of Porto (FMUP). She has worked with openEHR and implemented systems around the world on top of this standard since 2016. Her first contact with digital healthcare was in a Portuguese company for the security and interoperability of electronic health records, Healthy Systems. Subsequently, she moved to Better (then called Marand), where she worked as clinical modelling lead and informatics engineer. There she worked on all the main Better products including Pathfinder, Better Portal (demographics, clinical and terminology modules), the openEHR platform, ADL designer and the Better studio. Vanessa’s top interests are data information modelling, semantic interoperability, UX and UI that seamlessly facilitate the entry and visualization of patient records by clinical teams. She is also keenly interested in compliance of openEHR archetypes with the international CKM, which was the theme of her masters dissertation. She has also actively contributed with new openEHR archetypes for the community from the projects she has worked in. Most recently, she decided to go into clinical public research and recently joined the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH) as a Digital Health Engineer.
Koray Atalag, MD, PhD
Koray Atalag, MD, PhD
Trained as a medical doctor but an engineer at heart and self-taught full-stack developer, Koray has done his PhD in health informatics on openEHR and is a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health (FAIDH). With almost 30 years of experience in digital health as a developer, academic researcher and entrepreneur, he has strong background in EHR & health information architectures, interoperability with hands on implementation experience on key standards such as openEHR, HL7 v2, FHIR and SNOMED-CT. Koray has been contributing to standards development and governance at a global scale, in particular to openEHR. He was a member of the first openEHR Foundation Management Board and has been heavily involved in clinical modelling and software development. Koray is also a founding member of HL7 Turkey and has been on HL7 New Zealand Board since 2011 serving as vice-chair for one term. He is also an expert member of the ISO TC/251 Taskforce 7 Telehealth and Virtual Care Services. After 14 years of academic research at the University of Auckland, Koray co-founded The Clinician ,delivering a low-code SaaS solution for patient engagement and electronic PROMs & PREMs to drive value-based care. He recently started his consultancy business (GALATA-Digital) and looking to engage with exciting and innovative projects offering services with a focus on openEHR, FHIR, Value-Based Care and Digital Twins.
Tara Bonet
Tara Bonet
Biomedical engineer specialising in information standards and interested in learning about information technology that could improve the health system. Currently working for Catalan Health, participating in the new Catalan Electronic Health Record (HES) project based on the international standard openEHR.
Dr Sebastian Garde
Dr Sebastian Garde
Sebastian Garde is a Health Informatician, holding a doctorate from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He is also a Foundation Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health. Currently serving as Product Lead at Ocean Health Systems, Sebastian is responsible for the Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM). At Ocean, he has built on his research on the governance of clinical content models at CQUniversity Australia, culminating in the creation of the Clinical Knowledge Manager. He has been involved with openEHR since 2004. Before joining Ocean, Sebastian held various positions in academia. He worked as a Research Fellow in Health Informatics at CQUniversity Australia and as a Research Associate at Austin Health, Melbourne, one of Australia’s largest hospitals. Earlier in his career, Sebastian was a scientific employee in the field of Medical Informatics at the Heidelberg University Medical Centre, Germany.
Dr Joost Holslag
Dr Joost Holslag
Trained as a medical doctor at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, [the individual] has clinical experience in (neuro) surgery and elderly care. Currently working at Nedap as a clinical informatician, Joost focuses on elderly care. Having seen patients intermittently over the past few years, Joost intends to maintain a focus on IT while continuing clinical practice to keep their licence and experience current, ensuring that their clinical input remains relevant and valuable. Their goal is to support doctors in their challenging roles by providing excellent EHR software. Their interests lie in information modelling, multidisciplinary collaboration, interoperability, and improving the clinician experience with the company’s software and services.
Dr Andjela Pavlovic
Dr Andjela Pavlovic
Andjela is a medical professional, trained at the University Clinical Center of Ljubljana. Motivated by a great desire to expand her knowledge and apply medical expertise in innovative ways within the realm of health information technology, she embarked on a journey into openEHR in 2022. Joining Better, Slovenia as a Business Analyst, she played an integral role in the development of numerous health IT solutions, focusing particularly on Clinical Data Modelling.
Kanthan Theivendran
Kanthan Theivendran
Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon, Kanthan is dedicated to providing exceptional care to patients with a wide range of orthopaedic conditions. With extensive training in trauma and orthopaedics, he earned his medical degree from Imperial College London in 2003 and a BSc in Orthopaedic Science from University College London in 2001, where he was an undergraduate. He completed specialist senior fellowship training in shoulder and upper limb surgery in Derby & Wrightington. In addition to his clinical work, Kanthan is a committed researcher and holds the role of Research Lead within the department, as well as serving on the R&D committee for the hospital. As an Honorary Professor at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Biomedical Engineering Research Unit at Aston University, he is passionate about exploring new ways to improve healthcare outcomes. His interests lie in clinical trials, biomedical engineering, surgical innovation, health IT, and patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs). Kanthan is enthusiastic about working collaboratively with like-minded professionals on projects and innovations that contribute to improving healthcare outcomes for all patients.
Wouter Zanen
Wouter Zanen
Experienced Information Technology Program Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the hospital & health care industry. Skilled in IT Service Management, IT Strategy, Test Management, Management, and Healthcare. Strong program and project management professional with a Certified Professional Scrum Product Owner 1 (PSPO1) focused in Agile product owner from Prowareness.
CPB Expert Panel
Vebjørn Arntzen
Vebjørn Arntzen
Vebjørn is a registered nurse and informatician. He started out his career in Oslo University Hospital as nurse in 1988, continuing in the ICT-dept in 1996 following IT studies 1993-96. He has been working half time in Norway’s openEHR modelling, governance and training since 2016 and the other half within the hospital and the South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority promoting, designing and implementing openEHR functionality in the DIPS Arena EHR product. The Norwegian CKM is kept closely aligned with the international CKM, and all archetypes originating in requirements from Norwegian projects/implementations are made in English as original language, and reviews done in parallel. By this, Vebjørn has acted as editor in several projects in the international CKM. Since early 2024, he has volunteered as CKA in the international CKM.
Heidi Koikkalainen
Heidi Koikkalainen
Consultant and researcher in health and social care informatics, specialising in international data standards and the openEHR data modelling approach. Her work involves providing clinical modelling training and support to various client organisations internationally, as well as collaborating with the openEHR community to create standardised data models for health and social care information systems. She also works on research projects investigating the data and digital landscape in the health and social care sector in the UK. Her specific research interests include data standardisation, semantic interoperability of information systems, and social care data analytics/AI.
Dr Heather Leslie
CCIO
Dr Heather Leslie
CCIO
Heather is an experienced clinician informatician with a long history of involvement in international digital health standards. Her primary focus for many years has been on developing high-quality ‘little data’ to establish a coherent health data ecosystem. She has extensive expertise in clinical information modelling, clinical knowledge governance, data quality and safety, and engagement with clinicians and domain experts. As principal of Atomica Informatics (2018- ) her everyday work is involves data standardisation in international and national eHealth programs, including supporting logical model development for Australia’s Sparked FHIR accelerator. Heather was a leader of the openEHR Clinical Modelling program from 2008 to 2021 and administrator of the openEHR Clinical Knowledge Manager until 2023. She is now our Chief Clinical Information Officer (CCIO).
Silje Ljosland Bakke
Silje Ljosland Bakke
Silje is a registrered nurse and informatician, and has worked in health IT in the Norwegian hospital sector since 2009. She’s been a leading figure in Norway’s openEHR modelling, governance and training effort since 2013, and was co-lead for the openEHR Clinical Modelling Program from 2014-2021 and openEHR International board member from 2015-2021.
John Tore Valand
John Tore Valand
Senior Advisor at Helse Vest ITK
CKM – Clinical Knowledge Manager
The Clinical Knowledge Manager platform enables online collaborative authoring and governance of openEHR clinical data models (templates and archetypes), with facilities for managing metadata, validation, visualisation, internationalisation, clinical review cycles, terminology bindings, release management and publication.