Following the success of last year’s call for scientific papers and posters (now published as a BMC supplement), this year openEHR International, with the support of our sponsor Frontiers in Digital Health, is inviting researchers, clinicians, developers and healthcare innovators to submit abstracts for EHRCON26 — and to contribute to a new joint Research Topic in Frontiers in Digital Health.
About the Research Topic
openEHR and the Open Platform Ecosystem: Clinical Models, Vendor-Neutral Architectures, and Collaboration Across Standards for Interoperable, Patient-Centred Care
Health systems worldwide face persistent fragmentation of clinical data across proprietary systems, hindering care coordination, patient safety, and the secondary use of data for research, public health, and AI. Despite decades of standardisation efforts, most electronic health record deployments remain locked into vendor-specific data models that limit semantic interoperability and long-term data portability. The open platform approach, anchored in the openEHR specifications, offers an alternative architecture based on vendor-neutral, standardised clinical models managed collaboratively by clinicians and informaticians.
This Research Topic aims to consolidate and advance the evidence base around openEHR and the open platform paradigm, drawing on implementation experience, clinical modelling practice, and real-world health system deployments across diverse geographies and care settings. It seeks to surface both mature findings and emerging research questions at the intersection of open specifications, interoperability, and collaborative health data governance.
Suitable topics for manuscript submission include, but are not limited to:
- Design, governance, and lifecycle management of openEHR archetypes and templates in clinical practice
- National and regional open platform deployments: architecture, adoption, and lessons learned
- Interoperability between openEHR and other health data standards (HL7 FHIR, SNOMED CT, OMOP, ICD, LOINC)
- Vendor-neutral, standards-based approaches to longitudinal health records and data portability
- Clinical decision support, care pathways, and guidelines modelling using openEHR specifications
- Secondary use of openEHR-based clinical data for population health, research, and AI/machine learning
- Open platform approaches within the European Health Data Space (EHDS) and cross-border health data exchange
- Clinician and end-user engagement in clinical modelling and open specification co-design
- Implementation science perspectives on open platform adoption: barriers, facilitators, and sustainability
- Collaborative governance models across standards development organisations for health data interoperability
- Synthetic health data generation from openEHR-based repositories: methods, validation, and applications for research, education, and AI training
Two submission pathways are available — please read carefully.
Pathway 1 — EHRCON26 Conference Proceedings (abstract submission)
All abstracts (for posters or full papers) will be subject to a stringent peer review process. If accepted, they will be published in an Ebook as a supplement to the conference proceedings. The requirements for submitting an abstract are as follows:
- Title: 500 character upper limit
- Text: 1,000 words max.
- Figures: max. 2 (include figure captions at the bottom of the figure in a figure file)
- No supplementary material
- Posters/visual abstracts can be submitted
- Deadline for submission: 31 May 2026 (2026-05-31)
- Feedback will be provided to authors by 30 June 2026 (2026-06-30)
- Amendments required at peer review must be completed and corrected abstracts resubmitted by 15 July 2026 (2026-07-15)
- All abstracts must be sent to events@openehr.org
Any authors who wish to proceed to publication of a full article in Frontiers in Digital Health following acceptance of their abstract will need to meet publication costs themselves (or through their institution/employer). EHRCON26 attendees who confirm their participation in advance and have submitted an abstract will receive a 25% discount on this fee from Frontiers. If you wish to proceed to full article publication, please state this in your submission email to events@openehr.org.
The EHRCON26 Conference Proceedings are co-edited by an international panel of experts:
- Dr Jordi Piera Jiménez — openEHR International (UK) / Fundació TICSalut i Social (Spain)
- Dr Sophie de Klerk — Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen (NL)
- Dr Rix Groenboom — Hanze University of Applied Sciences (NL)
- Severin Kohler — BIH Charité (Germany)
- Dr Ian McNicoll — Director, openEHR International
Pathway 2 — Direct submission to the Frontiers Research Topic
The Research Topic is also open independently for direct submissions to Frontiers in Digital Health, outside of the conference proceedings process. Submissions made directly to the Research Topic will not be included in the EHRCON26 conference proceedings or Ebook supplement, and authors submitting via this pathway are responsible for 100% of the article publication fees. The 25% EHRCON26 attendee discount does not apply to direct Research Topic submissions. Full details, submission guidelines, and the direct submission link will be published on the Frontiers website in the coming weeks.
The Research Topic is co-edited by an international panel of experts:
- Dr Jordi Piera Jiménez — openEHR International (UK) / Fundació TICSalut i Social (Spain)
- Prof Lu Xudong — Zhejiang University, China
- Prof Shinji Kobayashi — Gifu University, Japan
- Dr John D Powderly — Carolina BioOncology Institute, United States
If you are unsure which pathway is right for you, please contact events@openehr.org before submitting.
The full research topic proposal will be published on the Frontiers website – please check this page for details in the coming weeks, when the link to research topic and further details will be published.