Clinical Program
Led by the Clinical Program Board (CPB)
Clinicians and modellers from around the world building the shared library of clinical models at the heart of openEHR.
What the Clinical Program does
The Clinical Program develops and publishes the clinical content that openEHR systems are built on: archetypes, templates, terminology subsets and guidelines. Clinicians from around the world design and review these models together, and every model is freely available in the Clinical Knowledge Manager.
- Archetypes: reusable definitions of clinical concepts, from single data points to groups of data.
- Templates: archetypes combined into data sets for specific uses.
- Terminology subsets, queries and process plans that make the models work in practice.
- Clinical implementation projects that test the models in real settings.
- Methodology, dissemination and monitoring of how openEHR is used in the field.
How it works
The program is led by the Clinical Program Board (CPB), whose members are drawn from public nominations. An Expert Panel of experienced modellers supports its work.
Models are developed, reviewed and published in the international Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM), where clinicians and domain experts take part in online reviews before each model is released.
Governance
The Clinical Program is governed by its Terms of Reference.
Get involved
Review models
Register on the Clinical Knowledge Manager and take part in reviewing archetypes and templates in your area of expertise.
Go to the CKMJoin the discussion
Ask questions, share modelling challenges and follow clinical discussions with the community.
Clinical forumBecome a member
Members can nominate and be nominated for program boards and help shape openEHR.
Join openEHR
The Clinical Program Board (CPB)
Co-Chairs
Paul Miller
Co-Chair
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Paul is a General Practitioner and clinical informatician. He is the clinical informatics lead for the NHS Scotland National Digital Platform, where he manages the clinical models for the platform’s data and teaches the team about openEHR. His other interests include clinical safety assessments, clinical terminologies and interoperability.
Vanessa Pereira
Co-Chair
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Vanessa has a BSc in Biomedical Engineering from the Polytechnic of Porto School of Engineering (ISEP) and an MSc in Medical Informatics from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP). She has worked with openEHR and implemented systems built on it around the world since 2016. Her first role in digital health was at Healthy Systems, a Portuguese company working on the security and interoperability of electronic health records. She then moved to Better (then Marand) as clinical modelling lead and informatics engineer, working on all of Better’s main products. Her main interests are information modelling, semantic interoperability, and user interfaces that make it easy for clinical teams to enter and view patient records. She is also keenly interested in the compliance of openEHR archetypes with the international CKM, the theme of her master’s dissertation, and has contributed new archetypes to the community. She recently joined the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH) as a Digital Health Engineer.
Members
Dr Koray Atalag
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Trained as a medical doctor but an engineer at heart and a self-taught full-stack developer, Koray did his PhD in health informatics on openEHR and is a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health (FAIDH). With almost 30 years in digital health as a developer, academic researcher and entrepreneur, he has a strong background in EHR and health information architectures and hands-on experience with openEHR, HL7 v2, FHIR and SNOMED CT. He was a member of the first openEHR Foundation Management Board and has been heavily involved in clinical modelling and software development. Koray is a founding member of HL7 Turkey, has been on the HL7 New Zealand Board since 2011, and is an expert member of ISO TC 215 Taskforce 7 on telehealth and virtual care. After 14 years of academic research at the University of Auckland, he co-founded The Clinician, a low-code platform for patient engagement and electronic PROMs and PREMs. He now runs his own consultancy, GALATA-Digital, focusing on openEHR, FHIR, value-based care and digital twins.
Tara Bonet
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Tara is a biomedical engineer specialising in information standards, with an interest in technology that can improve health systems. She works for the Catalan Health Service on the new Catalan electronic health record (HES), which is based on openEHR.
Dr Lars Fuhrmann
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Lars is a resident ophthalmologist with a strong interest in the usability and interoperability of healthcare IT, focusing on ophthalmology through FHIR and openEHR. He has experience in experimental app development and drafting archetypes. He aims to become interoperability coordinator for the German Ophthalmological Society and to advance standardised data models in ophthalmology.
Dr Sebastian Garde
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Sebastian is a health informatician with a doctorate from the University of Heidelberg and a Foundation Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health. As Product Lead at Ocean Health Systems he is responsible for the Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM), which grew out of his research on the governance of clinical content models at CQUniversity Australia. He has been involved with openEHR since 2004. Earlier, he was a Research Fellow at CQUniversity, a Research Associate at Austin Health in Melbourne, and a researcher in medical informatics at Heidelberg University Medical Centre.
Dr Joost Holslag
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Joost trained as a medical doctor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and has clinical experience in (neuro)surgery and elderly care. He works at Nedap as a clinical informatician focused on elderly care, and continues to see patients so his clinical input stays current. His goal is to support doctors in their demanding work with excellent EHR software. His interests are information modelling, multidisciplinary collaboration, interoperability and improving the clinician experience.
Dr Olha Nikolaieva
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Olha is a former oncologist with a strong focus on health IT and data modelling. She works as a clinical modeller at University Hospital Basel, helping develop digital solutions that support data integration and improve patient care workflows. She is passionate about standards-based approaches to clinical decision support and collaboration across healthcare teams.
Dr Andjela Pavlovic
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Andjela trained as a doctor at the University Clinical Centre of Ljubljana. Wanting to apply her medical expertise in health information technology, she started working with openEHR in 2022 when she joined Better in Slovenia as a Business Analyst, where she has played a key role in developing health IT solutions, especially clinical data modelling.
Dr Jannis Pesch
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Jannis is a medical doctor specialising in clinical informatics and healthcare standards. He works as a clinical modeller at University Hospital Basel, helping build a data-driven hospital through interoperability and seamless health information exchange.
Kanthan Theivendran
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Kanthan is a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon. He earned his medical degree from Imperial College London in 2003 and a BSc in Orthopaedic Science from University College London in 2001, and completed senior fellowship training in shoulder and upper limb surgery in Derby and Wrightington. He is Research Lead in his department, sits on his hospital’s R&D committee, and is an Honorary Professor in the Biomedical Engineering Research Unit at Aston University. His interests include clinical trials, biomedical engineering, surgical innovation, health IT and patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs).
Wouter Zanen
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Wouter is an experienced IT program manager in the hospital and healthcare sector, skilled in IT service management, IT strategy and test management, and a certified Professional Scrum Product Owner.
Expert Panel
Specialists who support the board’s work.
Dr Heather Leslie
Chief Clinical Information Officer, openEHR International
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Heather is an experienced clinician informatician with a long history in international digital health standards. For many years her focus has been on developing high-quality ‘little data’ to build a coherent health data ecosystem, with expertise in clinical information modelling, clinical knowledge governance, data quality and safety, and engagement with clinicians and domain experts. As principal of Atomica Informatics since 2018, she works on data standardisation in international and national eHealth programs, including logical model development for Australia’s Sparked FHIR accelerator. She led the openEHR Clinical Modelling Program from 2008 to 2021 and administered the openEHR Clinical Knowledge Manager until 2023.
Vebjørn Arntzen
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Vebjørn is a registered nurse and informatician. He began his career as a nurse at Oslo University Hospital in 1988 and moved into its ICT department in 1996. Since 2016 he has worked half-time on Norway’s openEHR modelling, governance and training, and half-time promoting, designing and implementing openEHR functionality in the DIPS Arena EHR. The Norwegian CKM is kept closely aligned with the international CKM, and Vebjørn has been an editor on several international CKM projects. Since early 2024 he has volunteered as a Clinical Knowledge Administrator (CKA) for the international CKM.
Heidi Koikkalainen
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Heidi is a consultant and researcher in health and social care informatics, specialising in international data standards and openEHR data modelling. She provides clinical modelling training and support to organisations internationally and works with the openEHR community on standardised data models for health and social care. She also researches the data and digital landscape in UK health and social care, with interests in data standardisation, semantic interoperability and social care data analytics and AI.
Silje Ljosland Bakke
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Silje is a registered nurse and informatician who has worked in health IT in the Norwegian hospital sector since 2009. She has been a leading figure in Norway’s openEHR modelling, governance and training since 2013, co-led the openEHR Clinical Modelling Program from 2014 to 2021, and was an openEHR International board member from 2015 to 2021.
John Tore Valand
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John Tore is a Senior Advisor at Helse Vest IKT in Norway.
Resources
- Clinical Knowledge Manager
The international library of openEHR archetypes and templates.
- Terms of Reference (PDF)
How the Clinical Program is governed.
- Apperta CKM (UK)
A national Clinical Knowledge Manager.
- HiGHmed CKM (Germany)
A national Clinical Knowledge Manager.
- Norway: Nasjonal IKT
Norway’s national Clinical Knowledge Manager.
- Slovenia: Ministry of Health
Slovenia’s national Clinical Knowledge Manager.
- Clinical forum on Discourse
Clinical modelling discussions with the community.
- Modelling tools
Tools for building archetypes and templates.
Other openEHR programs
- Specifications Program
The openEHR specifications: the technical standard every openEHR system is built on.
- Education Program
Recognised educators and the skills the world needs to adopt openEHR.
- Software Program
Open-source platform components and tools built on the specifications.