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.
This year’s project supervisors for the openEHR fellowship program are: Dr Jordi Piera-Jimenez, CEO of openEHR International; Dr Koray Atalag, Principal Consultant at GALATA-Digital and openEHR CPB Member; Dr Lars Fuhrmann, Interoperability Coordinator, Ophthalmology Resident, and Fellow of openEHR; Dr Joost Holslag, Director at freshEHR and openEHR CPB Member; Prof. Evelyn Hovenga, Honorary Professor of Digital Health at Australian Catholic University; Sebastian Iancu, co-owner at Cadasto and Code24 BV and co-chair of the openEHR Specifications Editorial Committee (SEC); Heidi Koikkalainen, Director & Senior Health and Social Care Informatics Specialist at freshEHR and openEHR CPB Expert Panel & IEB Member; Dr Luis Marco Ruiz, Health Information Systems Interoperability Expert at vitagroup and Chair of the openEHR Specifications Program Board (SPB); Dr Ian McNicoll, Founder at freshEHR and openEHR International Board Member; John Meredith, Interoperability Specialist at EY and Director at openEHR International; Dr David Moner Cano, Semantic Interoperability Consultant at Veratech and openEHR Recognised Educator; Dr Sidharth Ramesh, Founder and CEO of Medblocks and openEHR SEC Expert Panel Member; and Dr Erik Sundvall, Information Architect at Karolinska University Hospital.
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.
2026 Fellowship cohort
• Marco Pingitore • Santiago Pinto • Sheeren Khalifa • Stefan Buttigieg • Blanca Flores • Bright Ibezim • Ariorad Moniri • Lena Schell-Majoor
Dr. Somayeh Abedian is a seasoned health informatics executive and researcher with over 18 years of experience in health information systems, interoperability standards, and digital health innovation. She holds a PhD in IT Management (Business Intelligence), with a background in computer software engineering and multiple bachelor’s degrees. Her work has focused extensively on the application and advancement of international health informatics standards, such as openEHR and HL7 FHIR. Dr. Abedian began working with openEHR in 2008 and has since played an active role in the development of information models and health data exchange services based on the openEHR framework. She worked for over 17 years in the eHealth center of the Iranian Ministry of Health, where she played a strategic role in the design and development of the national EHR infrastructure based on openEHR. As part of this work, she led and supervised the design and implementation of several major national-level health information exchange services. She currently serves as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Toronto and a Senior Researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital Health and Prevention (Austria), contributing to international initiatives focused on digital health transformation 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.
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.
What is the openEHR Fellowship program?
An unparalleled opportunity to build knowledge and contribute tangible results to the openEHR community, with dedicated mentorship and guidance from experts in the field.
Key features of the program:
Mentorship and guidance from project supervisors and a community of senior fellows and experts.
Collaboration: You’ll attend (remote) monthly meetings, have exclusive access to an interactive Discourse area, and be provided with supplementary course materials including a monthly reading list.
Real-world impact: You’ll focus on an individual project that will deliver tangible outcomes to the openEHR community, including – but not restricted to – areas such as clinical modeling, standards development, and technical innovation.
Recognition: You’ll present your completed project at the year-end and graduate as an official openEHR Fellow.
Applications are now open, so submit yours and join the openEHR community in transforming healthcare.
Applications for Senior Fellows open until 28 February 2025. Email comms@openehr.org to express your interest.
