Dr Keisha Barwise works in collaboration with the Jamaican Ministry for Health and Wellness and is a Clinical Informatics Officer. She joins openEHR as Lead Clinical Modelling Coordinator.
Tell us a little more about your role and what you do.
I’m currently one of the Clinical Informatics Officers on the EHR Implementation pilot. My role encompasses Configuration and Data Standardization. Before this, I worked as the Digital Health Standards Program Coordinator. In that position, a lot of our work involved evaluating and implementing standards that best fit our digital health initiatives, as well as crafting the information models to capture clinical data. Our Senior Director for Health Information Systems, Dr Michele Roofe is passionate about the use of standards, particularly open standards, and openEHR is one of the key standards we want to implement. We also evaluated LOINC and SNOMED for vocabulary, along with ICD-10 and ICD-11 for reporting. Ultimately, we want to use openEHR to guide how we capture clinical data.
How did you become involved with the openEHR community?
I met Dr Roofe in 2018 at an open data bootcamp, where I had expressed an interest in health informatics. I was then invited to join a workshop hosted by PAHO and the Ministry of Health in 2019 and that’s where my relationship with openEHR really began. The workshop was led by Dr. Heather Leslie, Dr. Evelyn Hovenga, and Heather Grain.
It just clicked for me. Coming from a clinical background and having a passion for technology, the two worlds merged seamlessly.
We later did capacity building with Dr Ian McNicoll and Dr Jussara Rötzsch and have continued working with Dr Heather Leslie in the standardisation of our national epidemiology work, particularly Communicable Disease Surveillance.
Why is the openEHR community important to you?
The community provides a wealth of experience from professionals across various sectors of healthcare. I truly appreciate how open and collaborative it is. Whenever I have a question or concern, I can always reach out to someone for guidance. I have found the community to be incredibly welcoming, and it’s invaluable to be able to leverage that collective expertise.
How do you see openEHR progressing in Jamaica?
We recently completed a proof-of-concept interoperability platform in collaboration with Core Consulting from Brazil. The next step is to move that into production. In our proof of concept, we integrated two databases, one open source, and one proprietary. We normalised the data, and presented it through a coherent interface. The goal was to link records related to COVID-19, including lab results and vaccination data. We want the platform to be the nerve centre of our digital health ecosystem and openEHR to form the foundation for how clinical data is captured.
Throughout this process, we’ve learned a lot—especially about identity management and the importance of linking records across different points of care. Having a unique identifier has proven to be critical. Moving forward, we plan to expand this work by incorporating e-prescribing, labs, and imaging. We also hope to integrate the pilot electronic health record system into the MyHealth interoperability Platform.
What do you enjoy most about this kind of work?
I get to combine my two passions – healthcare and technology. Most importantly, I love seeing the tangible improvements we’re making in both patient care and clinician workflows. Making healthcare more accessible for patients and making clinicians’ work easier is incredibly rewarding.
What does the Clinical Modelling Coordinator role mean to you?
This role represents alignment on two levels. Personally, I’m passionate about using openEHR to improve healthcare by making high-quality data more accessible and meaningful. Being in this role allows me to contribute directly to that. Professionally, the role is about ensuring that openEHR clinical content remains consistent, up to date, and relevant. It involves close collaboration with international contributors and stakeholders to keep our shared models aligned with evolving clinical needs and standards. It’s meaningful work that bridges people, data, and purpose. I am really excited about learning and growing in this role.
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