How openEHR is run

Tomaž is the CEO of Better and has led large teams of developers building world-class software products for more than 30 years. He challenges his team to build better software using state-of-the-art technology, architectures and processes, and has a deep understanding of software platforms, architecture, deployment and business models. He has a proven track record of delivering innovative turnkey solutions for large clients in telecommunications, finance and healthcare, and has spoken at conferences including TeleManagement Forum, HIMSS and Health 2.0.

Dr Sam Heard MD, FRACGP, MRCGP, FACHI is a practising clinician who has worked throughout his career in inner London (UK) and the Northern Territory (Australia) to help standardise health information, so that clinicians and their patients can improve care and outcomes. This work began with the Good European Health Record in the early 1990s, continued through a long collaboration with Thomas Beale and CHIME at UCL and the founding of Ocean Informatics to support the vision, and culminated in setting up the openEHR Foundation in London in 2002. Sam was appointed Chair of the openEHR Foundation Board in June 2023, having served as a Director for many years. He was CEO until 2012 and is now Chair of Ocean Health Systems. He was a founding co-Chair of the HL7 EHR Technical Committee and has worked extensively with the UK and Australian national programmes to use and refine the openEHR method.

Ian is a former Scottish GP who has been involved in healthcare informatics for nearly 30 years, working with and promoting openEHR, first with Ocean Informatics and later as an independent consultant. His work has included promoting the Apperta open e-health platform ecosystem, with openEHR at its core, and a related development platform adopted by NHS England as part of its Code4Health initiative. He is a Director of the openEHR Foundation Board, a previous Chair of the openEHR Management Board, and was a Director of the International Board from March 2019 to November 2022.

Rachel Fellner is a digital health and health policy researcher specialising in health data governance, interoperability and the responsible use of AI in healthcare. At the OECD, she leads work on healthcare interoperability, examining the policy frameworks needed for trusted, equitable and efficient health data sharing across health systems. She also contributes to research on digital health policy, data governance and the use of AI to improve healthcare delivery. Rachel is passionate about using digital innovation to strengthen health systems, improve care quality and help patients play a more active role in managing their health.

John is a health informatics professional with 18 years’ experience in the NHS. He is currently a senior architect at EY, leading on clinical data modelling and interoperability, and working closely with partners across the UK and Europe. His academic research in health began with a paper on system usability, which showed him first-hand the benefits that well-architected software brings to clinicians. He is undertaking PhD research into clinical data structures and interoperability standards with the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and the Wales Institute of Digital Information. His recent research includes the Contextual Problem List and the FOXS stack, which combines FHIR, openEHR, XDS and SNOMED CT as a way to build an open platform of standardised specifications and components.

Dr Nils Hellrung is CEO of vitagroup and a long-standing advocate for open standards, interoperability and sustainable healthcare data infrastructures.

Mikael is a board member of the Swedish Medical Informatics Association, where he leads the association’s work on openEHR. Since 2019 he has worked at Cambio Healthcare Systems AB, where he is Principal Informatician in the Product Department. He holds an MSc in Computer Science and Engineering (2002) and a PhD in Medical Informatics (2010), both from Linköping University, where he was a researcher and lecturer in medical informatics from 2002 to 2019, focusing on how classifications and SNOMED CT can be combined with openEHR to structure health records. Mikael has been active in the openEHR community since 2004 and has served on SNOMED International’s advisory committees since their inception in 2007. He has also consulted for the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare and SNOMED International, and worked as an eHealth expert at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden AB.

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 aligned with OMOP standards. Since joining CatSalut, he has worked closely with an expert clinical modelling team to advance interoperable digital health systems, and is now focused on a unified, consensus-driven approach to structuring EHRs and orchestrating care processes across healthcare networks.

Thomas Webb is a digital health leader, Founder of Ethical Healthcare and Non-Executive Director at CNTW NHS Foundation Trust. With nearly two decades of experience supporting NHS organisations, he specialises in digital transformation, EPR strategy, data platforms and large-scale clinical change. After nine years as a CEO, he moved to a portfolio career focused on board-level digital strategy, improving clinician experience and designing services that improve care. His work is driven by impact over profit, with a focus on behavioural insight, co-production and human-centred transformation, and he helps NHS organisations build stronger digital teams, operating models and lasting change.

David Ingram is Emeritus Professor of Health Informatics at UCL, President of openEHR, a Director and past Chair of the openEHR Foundation, and a Trustee of the OpenEyes charity. In 1989 he was appointed to the first Chair in Medical Informatics in the UK, and in 1995 he established the UCL Centre for Health Informatics and Multiprofessional Education (CHIME), which he directed until retiring in 2011. He led the foundational health record research of the EU’s GEHR Project from 1991. From this and later projects came the openEHR Foundation, of which he was Founding Chair from 2002 to 2012, and CHIME’s principal contributions to the CEN and ISO 13606 standards.

Thomas is one of the founders of openEHR, the chief technical architect and editor of the openEHR specifications, and was co-chair of the Specifications Editorial Committee (SEC) until 2023. He has taken part in international standards work (OMG HDTF, HL7, CEN TC/251) for many years. He designed the archetype formalism (ADL), the archetype object model (AOM, now an ISO standard), the Basic Meta-Model (BMM) and much of the Task Planning and Decision Language specifications. He has consulted for Intermountain Healthcare, the US Department of Veterans Affairs and ministries, health departments and public agencies in Australia, the UK, Brazil, Jamaica, Denmark, Sweden and Catalonia. His academic background is in electrical engineering (communications) and computer science, and his earlier work spanned real-time distributed control systems for power, gas and mining, investment management and finance, and software configuration management. He has published and presented widely on the patient-centric EHR, model-based platform ecosystems and e-health strategy. Thomas is VP Informatics at GraphiteHealth.