openEHR Fellowships
If you’re passionate about driving innovation in digital health, the openEHR Fellowship program is your chance to enhance your skills and understanding, contribute to the openEHR community, and shape the future of healthcare interoperability.
Our program provides an exciting opportunity to build capacity and expertise within the openEHR ecosystem, across a broad range of areas of interest. So whether you’re passionate about clinical leadership, technical innovation, knowledge governance, or education and advocacy, there’s a place for you.
Key features of the program:
• mentorship and guidance: dedicated stream leads will mentor and supervise fellows throughout the year.
• collaboration: access monthly meetings, an interactive discourse area, and educational sessions.
• real-world impact: focus on projects that deliver tangible outcomes in areas such as clinical modeling, standards development, and technical innovation.
• recognition: present your project at the year-end and graduate as an official openEHR Fellow.
Project supervisors
The Fellowship stream leaders bring extensive expertise across key areas of digital health.
Prof Rachel Dunscombe leads the General stream, drawing on her experience as CEO of the Digital Health Leadership Programme and NHS Digital Academy, and her background as CIO at Salford Royal, one of the NHS’s most digitally advanced organisations. Dr Heather Leslie heads Clinical Modelling, with a strong focus on data quality, clinical information modelling, and international digital health standards, currently serving as openEHR’s Chief Clinical Information Officer. Dr Sam Heard leads Clinical Leadership, combining his clinical practice with decades of work in health information standardisation, including foundational roles in openEHR and HL7, and ongoing leadership in digital health boards.
Prof Rachel Dunscombe
Prof Rachel Dunscombe
Rachel is CEO of Digital Health Leadership Programme, NHS Digital Academy and was formerly the CIO and Director of Digital of the Salford Royal/NCA Group, one of the two most digitally mature organisations in the NHS. She has worked across the health care system as well as in the private sector and Europe. She is currently a visiting Professor at Imperial College London.
Dr Sam Heard
Dr Sam Heard
Sam Heard is a practicing clinician who has worked throughout his career in inner London (UK) and the Northern Territory (Australia) to assist the standardisation of health information to empower clinicians and their patients to improve health care and outcomes. This work began with the Good European Health Record in the early 90s, continued through a long collaboration with Thomas Beale and CHIME at UCL, the establishment of Ocean Informatics as a commercial vehicle to assist in the vision and culminating in setting up the openEHR Foundation in London in 2002. Sam was appointed as Chair of the openEHR Foundation Board in June 2023, where he has served as a Director for many years. He was CEO until 2012 and now a current board Chair of Ocean Health Systems. Sam was a foundation co-Chair of the HL7 EHR Technical Committee and has worked extensively with the UK and Australian national programs to utilise and refine the openEHR method.
Dr Heather Leslie
Dr Heather Leslie
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. Heather is now openEHR’s Chief Clinical Information Officer (CCIO).
Senior Fellows
We are pleased to introduce the six distinguished senior fellows of the new openEHR Fellowship Programme.
Dr Sebastian Garde, a leading health informatician, brings his extensive experience in clinical model governance, contributing to the development of openEHR’s Clinical Knowledge Manager. Dr Rong Chen, Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Cambio Healthcare Systems, has led groundbreaking work in clinical decision support and semantic interoperability. Dr Chunlan Ma, a gynaecologist and expert in openEHR-based software, offers a unique blend of clinical insight and technical expertise in data reporting and query engines. Koray Atalag, with nearly 30 years of experience in digital health and a PhD focused on openEHR, combines his medical training with his engineering background to advance global health data standards. Dr Seref Arikan, a key contributor to Ocean Informatics, is renowned for his work integrating AI with openEHR for clinical decision support. Finally, Diego Boscá, a specialist in semantic interoperability, has played a pivotal role in deploying interoperable health information systems and advancing global standards like SNOMED CT and HL7 FHIR.
These Fellows are committed to shaping the future of digital health through innovation and leadership in the openEHR community.
Dr Seref Arikan
Dr Seref Arikan
Seref Arikan is a software developer and consultant who is currently the technical lead at Ocean Informatics UK, where he has been working since 2010. He started his professional career in the nineties as a freelance developer working on B2B and B2C solutions and has worked in various health IT companies since 2001, in a wide range of roles from R&D and product development to consultancy. His work on openEHR began in 2002 while working for a hospital information system vendor. He has released various openEHR related software components and tools as open source since 2009, which were developed as part of his PhD in medical informatics. Seref’s PhD, completed at UCL CHIME under the supervision of Professor David Ingram, focused on the integration of openEHR specifications with AI for clinical decision support. He is currently in charge of development for various solutions at Ocean Informatics, with a focus on analytics, scalability, clinical product and platform development. His particular interest and most active research is in the implementation of openEHR persistence and relevant specifications such as AQL.
Diego Boscá Tomás
Diego Boscá Tomás
Diego is a computer engineer with a PhD from the Universitat Politècnica de Valencia. His experience includes the analysis, design, implementation, and deployment of semantically interoperable healthcare information systems using international electronic health record standards such as openEHR, HL7 FHIR, OMOP CDM, ISO13606, and HL7 CDA, and clinical terminology standards like SNOMED CT and ICD-10. He is a certified specialist in HL7 CDA, HL7 FHIR and SNOMED.
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.
Rong Chen MD, PhD
Rong Chen MD, PhD
Rong Chen, MD PhD, is the Chief Medical Informatics Officer and the head of Medical Informatics Group at Cambio Healthcare Systems, Sweden, where he is responsible for the research and development in clinical decision support and knowledge management. Rong holds a PhD degree in health informatics on the subject of EHR semantic interoperability from Linköping University, Sweden. He is an associated researcher at the Health Informatics Centre at Karolinska Institutet, where he lectures and supervises PhD and master students. Rong has contributed to several core openEHR design specifications, and has for many years led the Java Reference Implementation of openEHR. Rong is the lead author of Guideline Definition Language (GDL), which is designed to express clinical logic for scalable decision support with openEHR underpinning. Since May 2023 he is also a co-chair on the Specifications Editorial Committee (SEC).
Dr Sebastian Garde
Dr Sebastian Garde
Dr 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 Chunlan Ma
Dr Chunlan Ma
Chunlan is a gynaecologist and obstetrician who has been developing openEHR based software APIs and applications for more than 15 years. Her personal interest area is openEHR data reporting. She was the lead author of the openEHR AQL specification, and has worked in many other areas: openEHR RM implementation in C#, openEHR RM Schema, openEHR template to OPT transform, HL7 message to openEHR composition transform openEHR Platform, including EHR APIs, Demographic APIs, AQL query engine etc., openEHR data reporting. Her PhD (U South Australia) was in Computer-based Patient Education, knowledge engineering in patient profile.w propagating to Asia.
2025 Fellowship cohort
Dr Somayeh Abedian
Dr Somayeh Abedian
Dr Somayeh Abedian is a seasoned health informatics executive and researcher with extensive experience in health information systems, interoperability, and digital health. She holds a PhD in IT Management (Business Intelligence), with prior degrees in computer software engineering and English translation. Her academic work has focused on mobile health applications and international health informatics standards. Formerly with Iran’s Ministry of Health, she is currently on unpaid leave to broaden her international perspective. Somayeh serves as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Toronto and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute, contributing to global efforts in digital health and lifestyle improvement.
Ian Bennett
Ian Bennett
Ian Bennett is a Product Specialist at Better, where he has spent the past three years supporting openEHR-based projects. With a background as an NHS pharmacist, he brings a practical understanding of clinical workflows to digital health. While primarily involved in data modelling for demos and proofs of concept, he also consults on openEHR strategy across internal projects. Ian is passionate about improving population health through digital innovation and the strategic use of open data standards. He aims to create reusable artefacts – like data governance strategies – that support scalable, clinically impactful openEHR implementations across the healthcare ecosystem
Dr Osama Elhassan
Dr Osama Elhassan
Dr Osama Elhassan, PhD, FIAHSI, is a recognised digital health leader, capacity builder, and advocate for connected care. As Chairperson and Co-Founder of ZIMAM, he actively promotes digital health advancement across the Middle East. A 2025 HIMSS Changemaker in Health–Policy Influencer, Osama brings a wealth of experience in digital transformation and policy development. Selected as one of only ten fellows in the inaugural openEHR International Fellowship, he is committed to expanding openEHR adoption in the region. Through this programme, he aims to establish the openEHR Middle East Chapter and foster sustainable knowledge transfer across clinical, technical, and governance domains.
Dr Lars Fuhrmann
Dr Lars Fuhrmann
Dr Lars Fuhrmann is a resident ophthalmologist with a strong interest in healthcare IT usability and interoperability, focusing on ophthalmology through FHIR and openEHR standards. He has experience in experimental app development and archetype drafting. Lars is actively involved with openEHR International and aims to become the interoperability coordinator for the German Ophthalmological Society. His goal is to advance standardised data models in ophthalmology, improving data exchange and clinical outcomes in his field.
Nicola Hall
Nicola Hall
Nicola Hall is a Consultant Epidemiologist supporting the Ministry of Health and Wellness in Jamaica through the development of an Electronic Surveillance System. Since 2019, she has engaged local experts in clinical modelling using openEHR templates to enhance digital and paper-based data collection tools. Nicola’s experience with health information systems has revealed the critical need for interoperable, accessible patient data. The openEHR Fellowship will expand her practical knowledge and connect her with a global expert community. Passionate about population health research and policy impact, she aims to strengthen health systems and improve public health planning through advanced digital health solutions.
Silvio Kimmel
Silvio Kimmel
Silvio Kimmel is a Product Manager at vitagroup, specialising in applications built on HIP (Health Intelligence Platform), based on openEHR with EHRbase at its core and FHIR. He connects technical, clinical, and business stakeholders to enable solutions that improve patient care. With a medical background as a trained physiotherapist, a degree in business administration, and many years of industry experience as a consultant at Dedalus and a product manager at CompuGroup Medical, Silvio brings deep insight into clinical workflows and product strategy. He champions the adoption of open standard platforms to enable ecosystems where domain experts can create applications that drive innovation and support better patient outcomes. His work focuses on laying the foundation for lifelong medical data access and the development of patient-centric digital health solutions.
Martin Koch, PhD
Martin Koch, PhD
Martin Koch is a clinical knowledge modeller and CKA of the CKM CatSalut, currently contributing to openEHR International. With a background in biomedical engineering, he has worked across hardware and software development in medical technology, participating in every stage of product creation—from in-vitro studies to clinical trials and regulatory compliance. Now focused on public sector interoperability, Martin brings deep experience in quality systems and innovative design. His academic path, from Germany to lecturing at a University of Design and Engineering, reflects a commitment to advancing healthcare through technology. The fellowship supports his goal of building scalable openEHR tools and contributing to a more connected health ecosystem
Dr Eugene Kolah
Dr Eugene Kolah
Dr Eugene Kolah is the Founder and CEO of Peribloom, with deep expertise in openEHR as a foundation for interoperable, future-proof healthcare systems. He specialises in integrating siloed systems using openEHR’s dual modelling approach to enable standardised, semantically rich data exchange. His work often involves hybrid environments, blending openEHR with standards like FHIR and HL7 while ensuring compliance with privacy and governance regulations. Focused on creating sustainable digital health platforms, Eugene drives projects that streamline workflows, break down data silos, and improve patient outcomes. He is passionate about global health innovation and leads Peribloom’s mission to shape patient-centred, collaborative health ecosystems.
Kwarbai Aaron Maitala
Kwarbai Aaron Maitala
Kwarbai Aaron Maitala is a Technical Officer at the World Health Organization, specialising in immunization strategies and epidemic response systems. With over six years in public health, he focuses on managing vaccination campaigns against diseases such as measles and yellow fever in Nigeria. Holding a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology and currently pursuing a PhD, Kwarbai combines epidemiological expertise with strong skills in data analysis, health education, and stakeholder collaboration. He is passionate about improving health outcomes for vulnerable populations. Through the openEHR Fellowship, he aims to enhance his leadership in health informatics, drive innovative digital health solutions, and strengthen WHO’s capacity for interoperable health information systems.
Dr Xabier Michelena
Dr Xabier Michelena
Dr Xabier Michelena Vegas is a rheumatologist (MD, PhD) and Clinical Informatics Lead of the Digital Health Strategy at CatSalut. He began working with openEHR in 2022 at Vall d’Hebron Hospital, where he led innovation projects and piloted openEHR for primary use registries. He also deployed an EHRbase instance and explored ETL strategies in alignment with OMOP standards. Since joining CatSalut, he has worked closely with an expert clinical modelling team to advance interoperable digital health systems. Xabier is now focused on establishing a unified, consensus-driven approach to EHR structuring and care process orchestration across healthcare networks.