openEHR International is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr Jordi Piera-Jiménez PhD, MBA, FHIMSS, FIAHSI as Chief Executive Officer.
Over the past two years, Professor Rachel Dunscombe led openEHR International with energy, clarity, and a genuine commitment to transparency and collaboration. Under her leadership the organisation strengthened its governance, expanded its global footprint, and, critically, began building key strategic partnerships with other standards development organisations. We remain grateful for her contribution and the foundation she has built and our organisation now turns its focus to the next phase of leadership and growth.
Dr Piera-Jiménez brings more than 25 years’ experience in health IT and a rare combination of strategic, technical and policy expertise to this role. For the past decade he has been leading the development of digital health strategic approaches in Catalonia, most recently as Director of Digital Health Strategy at the Catalan Health Service, where he drove one of Europe’s most ambitious programmes of health system digitalisation. For the past four years, he has served openEHR International as a Director, which has given him a deep understanding of the community, its governance, and the challenges ahead.
Dr Piera-Jiménez also brings a strong track record of collaboration with leading international agencies. He is a core architect of the WHO’s Digital Public Infrastructure for Health initiative and recently joined the WHO Expert Steering Group on AI in Primary Health Care. He has contributed to OECD work on the future of health data interoperability and has been actively involved in shaping the policy and technical foundations of the European Health Data Space. He also serves as an Ambassador of the Global Health Connector, reinforcing his long-standing commitment to bridging communities and institutions across borders. These relationships, built over years of sustained engagement, will no doubt position openEHR to play a more visible and constructive role on the global stage.
On the research and academic front, Dr Piera-Jiménez is the principal investigator of the DS3 research group, with experience leading international research projects spanning digital health, integrated care, semantic interoperability and risk stratification. He holds editorial positions at the Journal of Medical Internet Research and the Journal of Integrated Care, and is a member of the Spanish Society of Medical Informatics. His contributions to the field have been recognised through Fellowships of both HIMSS and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics.
‘Health interoperability will not be solved by any single standard, and certainly not by any single organisation. It will be solved by people willing to work across boundaries, share what they learn, and keep patients and health systems at the centre. That is what I intend to do at openEHR International.’ Dr Piera-Jiménez
Dr Piera-Jiménez has repeatedly demonstrated that the future of health interoperability does not belong to any single standard, but rather to the people and systems that standards are meant to serve. His track record of working across openEHR, HL7 FHIR, SNOMED and international policy frameworks reflects a deep belief that collaboration between SDOs is not a nice-to-have, it is the only path forward.
This will be a central theme of his leadership of openEHR International. Dr Piera-Jiménez’s appointment will deepen openEHR’s engagement with the Joint Initiative Council for Global Health Informatics Standardisation and accelerate practical cooperation with HL7 International, SNOMED International, IHE, WHO’s Global Initiative on Digital Health, and other organisations through a focus on joint technical work, shared implementation learning, and a commitment to putting patients and health systems ahead of institutional boundaries.
The health sector is entering a period of profound transformation as AI, genomics, and population-scale data reshape what is possible. As the European Health Data Space becomes a reality, open, computable and semantically rich health data architectures are no longer optional, but essential. The appointment of Dr Piera-Jiménez signals openEHR International’s commitment to addressing this challenge openly and collaboratively. We look forward to what comes next.
— The openEHR International Board of Directors
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