openEHR Roadmap meeting Oslo

Event reports | Sept. 16, 2014

Summary

On September 16 and 17 a general openEHR meeting was held in Lillestrom, near Oslo, with the intention of developing the roadmap for various key activities.
Thanks to DIPS asa, Norway, for organising and providing meeting rooms, catering and IT support.

Over 30 attendees included participants from 5 current openEHR vendor companies, new vendors, Norwegian and Swedish health organisations and universities, and various other organisations.

The meeting followed an agenda covering the following topics (details here ):

  • specifications - physical format,
  • clinical modelling industry sprint
  • professionalism - training and certification
  • conformance and product accreditation
  • Community infrastructure, website
  • working with the openEHR Foundation: governance and membership
  • tooling, including next generation archetype / template / terminology editor

The meeting was very successful in terms of information sharing, discussions, and proposals.

Outcomes

Overall priorities

During the opening discussion, the following priorities were particularly mentioned:

  • Entry level openEHR - getting started is too hard for newcomers
  • Deal with licensing FUD - better address wrong perceptions about openEHR licences, which are all in fact either "Apache 2" or "Creative Commons", and thus more open than most alternatives/standards.
  • Support for localisation, affiliate groups
  • Restarting specifications release work
  • Better tooling - the existing modelling tools are showing their age and need comprehensive renewal

Key presentations

  • Thomas Beale provided a brief scene-setting introduction , based on the concept of 'investible standards' from a recent blog post .
  • Ian McNicoll presented on 'working with the Foundation', which led to a lively discussion on the need for clearer governance of the foundation, including clearer membership rules and statutes (by-laws).
  • Heather Leslie and Ian McNicoll presented the 'industry sprint ', a funded archetype development activity to create 69 published archetypes on a short time frame in 2014/2015.
  • Ian McNicoll presented on the UK HANDI-HOPD activity , an openEHR-based health apps demonstration and learning space backed by the NHS.
  • Rong and Iago presented on Guideline Definition Language (GDL) , an ADL-like language for representing guidelines that Cambio has implemented.
  • A brainstorm on conformance specification and methods was undertaken.
  • Marand presented on IHE and FHIR in openEHR .
  • A brainstorm on the openEHR web presence was undertaken.
  • Various people provided country updates for openEHR activity.
  • We ran out of time for a planned presentation on Localisaiton by Shinji Kobayashi, but he provided notes stating 3 issues: need for endorsement of local openEHR activities by openEHR Foundation; need for framework and rules for autonomous running of openEHR Affiliates, need for more active leadership on localisation from the centre.

Agreements and actions

  • The industry partners present endorsed the archetype industry sprint
  • A next generation archetype tooling project will be commenced.
    • A technical group will develop an outline architecture and project proposal in the next 3 weeks. Erik Sundvall has set up a wiki page for this project.
    • The project will be open source, and be open to use by developers from any organisation using archetypes.
    • Most end users (e.g. clinicians) should be able to use main parts of the tooling via modern web-browsers, without needing to install extra software locally. (Some functionality might require access server-based components though.)
    • We will aim for a combined project that covers the needs of openEHR, 13606, CIMI and any other archetype user community.
  • Specifications:
    • review specifications governance - Thomas Beale, Erik Sundvall, Gunnar Klein
      • related: determine whether specifications should be easily forkable in the future, and if the current "ND" in CC-BY-ND licence makes this unnecessarily hard.
    • GDL and AQL will become formal specifications
    • rename ADL 1.5 to ADL 2.0 and develop a plan for creating 'interior versions'
    • all existing specifications will be converted to a new text-based form and publishing toolchain; new specifications will be developed in the new format;
      • Asciidoc proposed as candidate - Bjørn Næss, Bostjan Lah, Borut Fabjan, Thomas Beale to research and provide a proposal
    • specifications work will start as soon as the new openEHR.org server is up and running, and may commence with a simplified change process, by common consent of committer group.
  • Conformance
    • a technical group will get together and develop a conformance approach based on the brainstorm:
      • Borut Fabjan, Bostjan Lah (Marand), DIPS, Rong (Cambio), Code24, Thomas Beale (Ocean)
  • Infrastructure and website
    • the industry partners will fund new hosting and related infrastructure ASAP
    • a web committee self-nominated to manage the web presence, including incorporating the numerous suggestions from the brainstorm: Jon Tysdahl, Silje Ljosland Bakke, Shinji Kobayashi, Gunnar Klein, Martin van der Meer, Vebjørn Arntzen, Luis Marco, Adriana Danilakova
  • Governance
    • It was agreed that we seek to work with the board on a clearer set of organisational rules and governance procedures , reflecting increased influence of members, particularly industry partners, and the need for a 'lighter touch' management.
    • All governance-related material, including statutes/by-laws should be publicly available on the web.
    • Investigate if it is possible and better to incorporate the Foundation as a self-standing international organisation, with no specific link to any large owning organisation, as is the case with UCL currently.

Attendees

Rong Chen MD, PhD, Cambio Health Systems, Sweden
Iago Corbal, Cambio Health Systems, Sweden

Martin van der Meer, Code24
Sebastian Iancu, Code24

Bjørn Næss, DIPS
Sigurd From, DIPS
Krister Jom Skoglund, DIPS
Tomas Nordheim Alme MD, DIPS
Kjetil Jorgensen, DIPS

Tomaz Gornik, Marand
Borut Fabjan, Marand
Bostjan Lah, Marand

Thomas Beale, Ocean Informatics UK
Adriana Danilakova, Ocean Informatics UK
Hugh Leslie MD, Ocean Informatics
Heather Leslie MD, Ocean Informatics

Erik Sundvall PhD, County Council of Östergötland and Linköping University, Sweden

Ian McNicoll MD, FreshEhr.com

Jonas Andersson, Raysearch Labs
Per Larsson, Raysearch Labs

Luis Marco Ruiz, Norwegian Center for Integrated Care and Telemedicine, Tromsø, Norway
David Moner, IBIME, Polytechnic University Valencia, Spain

Shinji Kobayashi MD, Kyoto University, Japan

Vebjørn Arntzen, Oslo University Hospital, Norway
Hallvard Lærum MD, CMIO, Oslo University Hospital, Norway
Arve Kaaresen, Oslo University Hospital, Norway

Silje Ljosland Bakke RN, National ICT/Bergen Hospital Trust, Norway

Andreas Haandlykken, codeo.no

Gunnar Klein MD, Örebro University School of Business, Sweden

Jon Tysdahl, Fürst, Norway
Leif Arne Grønlund, Fürst, Norway


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