The openEHR Software Program Board (SPB) guides the development of open-source software built on the openEHR specifications. Whether you’re a vendor, clinician, researcher or developer, the SPB is where decisions about openEHR’s software direction are made, and your input helps shape them.
The SPB governs the openEHR Software Program under the authority of the openEHR International Board. Its membership follows a meritocratic model, inspired by the Apache Foundation and other major open-source organisations, and aims to represent key stakeholders including vendors, healthcare professionals and government.
The Software Program creates open-source platform components and tools, and takes part in connectathons and implementation trials to test and refine them.
What the SPB does
Strategic leadership: setting open-source strategy, direction for tooling and CDRs, and reference architecture blueprints
Governance: overseeing new and existing openEHR software products
Roadmaps and releases: managing release planning for open-source deployments and other software
Change management: reviewing issues and Change Requests and taking changes through the development lifecycle
Community communication: sharing roadmap updates, releases and requests for input
Risk and reporting: managing risk and reporting to the openEHR International Board
How it works
The SPB meets online at least monthly and collaborates asynchronously in between. Decisions are made by consensus, with formal voting when needed. Expert Panels bring in specialist knowledge on specific topics, and Working Groups carry out sustained pieces of work. Membership and activities are publicly documented.
Get involved
Follow the board’s work. Roadmaps, Change Requests, governance documents and Working Group outputs are published on Confluence. Go to the SPB Confluence space →
Talk to other implementers. Much of openEHR’s software is built by organisations working independently on research and commercial products. Connect with them in the implementation forums and specification forums.
Luis Marco-Ruiz
Co-Chair
Luis Marco-Ruiz
Co-Chair
Luis Marco-Ruiz, PhD, is a data engineer at HIGHmed Consortium, who focuses his work on the adoption of information standards and terminologies for clinical data reuse and clinical decision support. He holds a MSc in Applied Statistics and a PhD in Health Science. Since 2007 Dr. Marco-Ruiz has participated as a developer, advisor, and researcher in private- and public-funded projects in Norway, Germany, the UK, and Spain. In 2013 he joined the Norwegian Centre for E-health Research where he works in the development of national data reuse infrastructures and advises the Norwegian health authorities on the adoption of clinical information standards and biomedical ontologies. In addition, he works as a semantic interoperability specialist at the Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics (Hannover Medical School) developing a cross-institutional data reuse network for the HiGHmed consortium, which involves the Hannover Medical School, Heidelberg University Hospital, and University Medical Center Göttingen, among others. Luis is a member of openEHR SEC Expert Panel and Software Program Board.
Marcus Baw
Co-Chair
Marcus Baw
Co-Chair
Marcus Baw is a medical doctor, software engineer, and open source campaigner based in the UK. Working with the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health he has pioneered open source Digital Growth Chart software that is deployed across the UK and internationally.
Pascal Biermann
Pascal Biermann
Pascal Biermann began his career at Leibniz University, where he developed simulation software for a doctoral researcher studying production processes in large workshops. He now works as a Reseacher for Big Data in Medicine and at the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. Combining technical versatility with practical problem-solving, Pascal supports reliable IT operations while contributing to digital development.
Jonas Bucher
Jonas Bucher
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.
Iago Corbal
Iago Corbal
Erik Sundvall has an MSc in Information Technology, and PhD in Medical informatics from Linköping University, Sweden. Recent activities focus on trying to tie things together via implementation of an openEHR based educational EHR system (LiU EEE) enabling reusable patient overview system at the same time as it is a test platform for a scalable REST based openEHR component/service design that aims to make it easier to deploy openEHR based systems by putting together components from different projects/vendors/platforms. Erik has also supervised several student projects and MSc theses, e.g. one leading to the first openEHR Archetype editor in Java.
Giovanni Delussu
Giovanni Delussu
Giovanni Delussu is an Aeronautical Engineer who graduated from the Polytechnic of Turin in 1998 and holds a PhD in Biomedical Informatics/Engineering from the University of Cagliari (2017). He is currently a researcher in the Digital Health group at CRS4. Throughout his career, Giovanni has worked in diverse fields, including computational fluid dynamics (CFD), computational grid generation, hydrodynamics of boats, fluid dynamics of sails, combustion modeling, structural dynamic simulation of cardiac valves, the Rubbia Mars rocket project, concentrated solar power in renewable energy, and Big Data solutions. His current research interests focus on digital healthcare solutions, with a strong emphasis on standards and interoperability frameworks such as openEHR, FHIR, and OMOP CDM, as well as the application of FAIR principles. Since 2021, he has been a member of the BBMRI-ERIC CS-IT working group.
In his early professional years, Sebastian developed complex web-based applications for the healthcare sector in Romania and later on in The Netherlands. His main interests were data interoperability, telemedicine and knowledge-based systems. After receiving an Engineering degree in Automation and Computer Science, Sebastian focused on developing a completely new PHP-based implementation of openEHR specifications. In 2010, he became one of the three founders of Code24 BV, and has since been the lead software engineer within this company. Currently, Code24 BV provides openEHR based IT solutions (Base24, mConsole) for more than 100,000 patients and their care providers in the mental healthcare sector in The Netherlands. Since May 2020 he is also a co-chair on the Specifications Editorial Committee (SEC).
Monica Jones
Monica Jones
Monica is the Chief Data Officer for the HDRUK Data Research Hub for Cancer – DATA-CAN, Associate Director HDR North and also the Executive Lead for Population Health Management for the Yorkshire and Humber Care Record (YHCR). <br>A highly motivated technical expert and leader with extensive Healthcare and Life Sciences knowledge and experience. ISEB qualified Enterprise and Solutions Architect with a proven track record of designing and delivering complex, high value solutions to exceptional standards. She has many years’ experience defining and directing current and future information systems. As the Managing Director of Animo Consultancy Ltd she has provided consultancy services for CRUK, MRC, Genomics England, NHS England and the MOD.<br>Her NHS frontline experience most recently was as CIO at the Rotherham NHS FT where she was responsible for the leadership, development and delivery of high quality Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics support, to inform the decision making ability of clinicians, staff and managers at all levels of the organisation (from ward to board). The Trust was rated “Outstanding” for Digital in 2019. <br>An effective communicator used to working on major public and private sector initiatives, who is able to integrate teams to achieve their maximum potential. International clinical terminology and data standards (SNOMED CT, ICD-10, HL7 FHIR) expert promoting safe and effective health information for better patient outcomes. She is the Deputy Chair of the NHS Digital Data Design Authority (DDA) and Chair of the YHCR Data Architecture Design Authority (DADA).
Kathir Kaliyaperumal
Kathir Kaliyaperumal
Software Developer at Nedap Healthcare. He is the technical lead of this team.
Martin Andreas Koch
Martin Andreas Koch
Martin Koch is a clinical knowledge modeller and CKA of the CKM CatSalut, currently contributing to openEHR International. With a background in biomedical engineering, he has worked across hardware and software development in medical technology, participating in every stage of product creation—from in-vitro studies to clinical trials and regulatory compliance. Now focused on public sector interoperability, Martin brings deep experience in quality systems and innovative design. His academic path, from Germany to lecturing at a University of Design and Engineering, reflects a commitment to advancing healthcare through technology. The fellowship supports his goal of building scalable openEHR tools and contributing to a more connected health ecosystem
Adnan Marvillo
Adnan Marvillo
Pablo Pazos Gutierrez has a Computer Engineering degree from UdelaR (University of the Republic), Uruguay. He has worked with health information systems, standards and interoperability since 2006. His first project in eHealth was an EHR based on openEHR, and he is part of the openEHR community since 2006. His interests include software architecture of distributed and integrated systems, information models, clinical data repositories, open platforms and open source. In 2011 Pablo created the first online full length course about openEHR in Spanish, since then he coordinates the openEHR community in Spanish. In 2012 Pablo founded CaboLabs, a company that provides consultancy and training in health information systems, standards and interoperability. Since then he has developed several courses and workshops. Pablo is a member of openEHR SEC heavily involved in openEHR software development, and appointed to the openEHR Education Program Board in 2022, as well as in disseminating the openEHR standard in Latin America, in association with the Chilean Association of Health Informatics (ACHISA).
Daniel McCafferty
Daniel McCafferty
Erik Sundvall has an MSc in Information Technology, and PhD in Medical informatics from Linköping University, Sweden. Recent activities focus on trying to tie things together via implementation of an openEHR based educational EHR system (LiU EEE) enabling reusable patient overview system at the same time as it is a test platform for a scalable REST based openEHR component/service design that aims to make it easier to deploy openEHR based systems by putting together components from different projects/vendors/platforms. Erik has also supervised several student projects and MSc theses, e.g. one leading to the first openEHR Archetype editor in Java.
Jesús Pulgarín Paños
Jesús Pulgarín Paños
Shinji Kobayashi is an associate professor in the EHR research unit, Kyoto University. He has worked as a clinical hematology/oncologist and researched clinical informatics. He launched the Japanese openEHR affilate and leads openEHR localisation in Japan as well as the Ruby implementation of openEHR. This localisation work is now propagating to Asia.
Michael Schnell
Michael Schnell
Severin Kohler is a health informatician shaping industry standards. Currently, he serves as a Member of the Specification Board at openEHR International, where he plays a key role in driving advancements in healthcare informatics. His work involves actively participating in various medical informatics projects, including significant contributions to initiatives like HiGHmed and the NUM project.
James Shelbourne
James Shelbourne
Bjørn has implemented openEHR systems since 2010 and has been a member of the specification editorial committee since 2015. Bjorn believes in an open platform approach and that the openEHR community is the best approach to make a global approach to better health data, which is needed to be able to provide better healthcare services and for the research for new treatments. He received his M. Sc. in Telecommunications from the Norwegian university of science and technology, NTNU. Before this he worked some years as a physiotherapist. He has been working in e-health in various areas, starting as a developer of a national booking solution for medical services in Norway. Later he worked on integration and interop between systems and organizations. More recently he has focused on implementation of openEHR in DIPS Arena, the next generation of the DIPS EHR solution. His contributions to this work has included both openEHR evangelism and on the specification and implementation of the DIPS openEHR server.
