Meet our Senior Fellows…

Dr Seref Arikan

“I am willing to take on the relevant responsibilities, to help members of openEHR who are accepted for the Fellow position, as much as my experience, knowledge and existing commitments and responsibilities allow.”

Dr Seref Arikan is a software developer, consultant, and technical lead at Ocean Informatics UK, where he has contributed since 2010. He began working with openEHR in 2002 and has been an active contributor to its community and mission ever since. Seref holds a PhD in medical informatics from UCL CHIME, where his research – supervised by Professor David Ingram – explored integrating openEHR with AI for clinical decision support. He has released various open source software for openEHR as early as 2009, and has contributed to the Specifications Editorial Committee since 2018. With a background in B2B and B2C systems and deep expertise in analytics, persistence, scalability and clinical platform development, Seref’s current focus is on implementing openEHR persistence and AQL specifications. He remains a core member of the openEHR International community, engaging in both technical leadership and peer support.

Dr Koray Atalag

“Contributing to the growth of openEHR requires more than participation; it demands active mentoring, thoughtful collaboration, and sustained support across the community.”

Koray Atalag, MD, PhD, is a seasoned digital health expert with nearly 30 years’ experience spanning software development, research and entrepreneurship. Medically trained but an engineer at heart, he holds a PhD in health informatics focused on openEHR. He is a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health and a recognised contributor to global health data standards. His work spans EHR architectures, interoperability, and implementation of openEHR, HL7 v2, FHIR and SNOMED-CT. A founding member of HL7 Turkey and board member of HL7 New Zealand since 2011, he also contributes to ISO’s TF7 Telehealth and Virtual Care taskforce. After 14 years in academia at the University of Auckland, Koray co-founded The Clinician, a low-code SaaS PROMs platform advancing value-based care. He now leads GALATA-Digital, offering consultancy in openEHR, FHIR, Value-Based Care and Digital Twins.

Diego Boscá Tomás

“I see the Fellowship not just as a title, but as an ongoing commitment to help strengthen openEHR’s knowledge base, empower peers, and maintain a culture of quality and accountability.”

Diego Boscá, Semantic Interoperability Consultant, Veratech for Health. 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.Diego is also a co-author of LinkEHR, a tool for archetype-based data integration, and has published extensively on EHR standardisation and interoperability.

Dr Rong Chen

“I recognise the importance of structured guidance for new Fellows and will offer what I can by drawing on my background and experience.”

Dr Rong Chen, MD, PhD, is a Senior Business Unit Manager and Product Manager of Cambio Clinical Decision Support (CDS) product line at Cambio Healthcare Systems in Sweden. He leads a dedicated product team in research and development of CE-marked clinical decision/process support applications, ranging from primary care, cardiology, elderly care, acute medicine, rare disease/genetics and oncology with deployments in several clinical systems across multiple markets. Rong earned his MD from Shanghai Medical University, and PhD from Linköping University with a thesis on EHR semantic interoperability and knowledge representation using EHR standards. A long-time contributor to openEHR, Rong has led the first openEHR Java Reference Implementation for many years and has been a key contributor to many of the core openEHR specifications. He is the main author of the Guideline Definition Language (GDL v1/v2) specifications, designed to support large-scale CDS application development using openEHR archetypes. Since May 2023, he has served as one of the co-chairs of the openEHR Specifications Editorial Committee. He’s currently the lead of the Clinical Decision/Process Support Working Group at openEHR.

Dr Sebastian Garde

“Showcasing openEHR clinical models is important but not sufficient—there is a need for comprehensive knowledge governance to achieve high-quality, reusable models and avoid wild growth of overlapping concepts.”

Dr Sebastian Garde is a Health Informatician with a PhD from the University of Heidelberg and a Foundation Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health. He is currently Product Lead at Ocean Health Systems, where he oversees the Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM)—a platform he helped shape through years of research into clinical content governance at CQUniversity Australia. Sebastian has been active in the openEHR community since 2004 and continues to contribute to the evolution of digital health standards. Before joining Ocean, he held academic roles including Research Fellow in Health Informatics at CQUniversity and Research Associate at Austin Health in Melbourne. His early career included work in Medical Informatics at Heidelberg University Medical Centre. With a strong focus on structured clinical data and model governance, Sebastian remains at the forefront of health informatics innovation.

Dr Chunlan Ma

“I am fully committed to the fellowship program and am eager to contribute to the openEHR community by supporting new Fellows, sharing my expertise, and fulfilling any relevant responsibilities within the scope of my experience and existing commitments.”

Dr Chunlan Ma is a gynaecologist and obstetrician with over 15 years’ experience developing openEHR-based software APIs and applications. Her key focus is on openEHR data reporting, where she has made significant technical contributions. She is the lead author of the openEHR AQL specification and has worked extensively on C# implementations of the openEHR Reference Model, schema generation, and template-to-OPT transformations. Chunlan has also contributed to HL7-to-openEHR composition mapping and platform-level components such as EHR and Demographic APIs, as well as the AQL query engine. Her PhD from the University of South Australia explored computer-based patient education and knowledge engineering in patient profiling. Blending clinical insight with technical expertise, Chunlan continues to support robust, standards-based innovation in digital health.