Specifications Program

Co-Chairs

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  Dr Rong Chen

  Co-Chair

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  Rong is Chief Medical Informatics Officer and Head of the Medical Informatics Group at Cambio Healthcare Systems in Sweden, where he leads research and development in clinical decision support and knowledge management. He has more than two decades of experience in health informatics and a PhD from Linköping University on EHR semantic interoperability, and is an associated researcher at Karolinska Institutet, where he teaches and supervises graduate students. A long-time contributor to openEHR, he led the Java reference implementation, played a key role in defining core specifications, and is the lead author of the Guideline Definition Language (GDL). He has been co-chair of the Specifications Editorial Committee since May 2023.

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  Sebastian Iancu

  Co-Chair

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  Early in his career, Sebastian developed complex web applications for healthcare in Romania and then the Netherlands, with interests in data interoperability, telemedicine and knowledge-based systems. After an engineering degree in Automation and Computer Science, he built a new PHP-based implementation of the openEHR specifications. In 2010 he co-founded Code24 BV, where he has been lead software engineer ever since. Code24’s openEHR-based solutions (Base24, mConsole) support more than 100,000 patients and their care providers in Dutch mental healthcare. He has been a co-chair of the Specifications Editorial Committee since May 2020.

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  Boštjan Lah

  Co-Chair

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  Boštjan has been lead developer on the design, development and implementation of Better’s openEHR platform (formerly Think!EHR), a health data platform for real-time, transactional storage, querying, retrieval and exchange of health data. He leads a team of developers delivering high-quality, cost-effective solutions that add value for developers and end users.

Members

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  Dr Seref Arikan

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  Seref is a software developer, consultant and technical lead at Ocean Informatics UK, where he has worked since 2010. He began working with openEHR in 2002 and has released open-source openEHR software since 2009. His PhD at UCL CHIME, supervised by Professor David Ingram, explored integrating openEHR with AI for clinical decision support. He 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 platforms, his current focus is implementing openEHR persistence and the AQL specifications.

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  Thomas Beale

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  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 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 public agencies in Australia, the UK, Brazil, Jamaica, Denmark, Sweden and Catalonia. Thomas is VP Informatics at GraphiteHealth.

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  Diego Boscá Tomás

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  Diego is a computer engineer with a PhD from the Universitat Politècnica de València. He has analysed, designed, implemented and deployed semantically interoperable healthcare information systems using openEHR, HL7 FHIR, OMOP CDM, ISO 13606 and HL7 CDA, and clinical terminologies such as SNOMED CT and ICD-10. He is a certified specialist in HL7 CDA, HL7 FHIR and SNOMED.

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  Dr Sebastian Garde

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  Sebastian is a health informatician with a doctorate from the University of Heidelberg and a Foundation Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health. As Product Lead at Ocean Health Systems he is responsible for the Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM), which grew out of his research on the governance of clinical content models at CQUniversity Australia. He has been involved with openEHR since 2004.

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  Birger Haarbrandt

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  Birger holds a BA in Medical Information Management and an MSc in Computer Science. From 2013 to 2017 he established the Hannover Medical School Translational Research Framework (HaMSTR), exploring how openEHR could enhance traditional data warehousing. He previously worked on a regional health network in Lower Saxony based on IHE XDS, and as a software developer for CGM MEDISTAR. He helped shape the HiGHmed consortium’s bid to Germany’s Medical Informatics Initiative and, from January 2018, worked in HiGHmed as a software architect at the Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics, building an open platform based on IHE, openEHR and FHIR across eight German university hospitals.

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  Dr Joost Holslag

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  Joost trained as a medical doctor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and has clinical experience in (neuro)surgery and elderly care. He works at Nedap as a clinical informatician focused on elderly care, and continues to see patients so his clinical input stays current. His interests are information modelling, multidisciplinary collaboration, interoperability and improving the clinician experience.

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  Shinji Kobayashi

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  Shinji is an associate professor in the EHR research unit at Kyoto University. He has worked as a clinical haematologist and oncologist and researches clinical informatics. He launched the Japanese openEHR affiliate and leads openEHR localisation in Japan, as well as the Ruby implementation of openEHR. This localisation work is now spreading across Asia.

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  Severin Kohler

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  Severin is a health informatician who takes part in medical informatics projects including HiGHmed and the NUM project, and contributes to shaping industry standards through the Specifications Editorial Committee.

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  Mattijs Kuhlmann

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  Mattijs is a software developer at Nedap Healthcare, where he is technical lead of his team.

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  Dr Ian McNicoll

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  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. 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.

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  Bjørn Næss

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  Bjørn has implemented openEHR systems since 2010 and has been a member of the Specifications Editorial Committee since 2015. He believes an open platform approach, and the openEHR community, are the best way to achieve the better health data needed for better healthcare and research. He has an MSc in Telecommunications from NTNU, and worked as a physiotherapist before that. His e-health career began with a national booking system for medical services in Norway, followed by work on integration and interoperability. More recently he has focused on implementing openEHR in DIPS Arena, the next generation of the DIPS EHR, including the specification and implementation of the DIPS openEHR server.

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  Matija Polajnar

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  After a PhD in data mining at the University of Ljubljana and a spell at an insurance company’s software division, Matija joined Better (then Marand) in 2014. He began in the team building end-user products on Better’s openEHR platform, moved to the platform development unit as a software architect and developer in 2017, and has been the team’s technical lead since 2020.

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  Pablo Pazos Gutiérrez

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  Pablo has a Computer Engineering degree from the University of the Republic (UdelaR), Uruguay, and has worked with health information systems, standards and interoperability since 2006, when his first eHealth project, an openEHR-based EHR, brought him into the community. In 2011 he created the first full-length online openEHR course in Spanish, and he has coordinated the Spanish-speaking openEHR community since. In 2012 he founded CaboLabs, which provides consultancy and training in health information systems, standards and interoperability. He is heavily involved in openEHR software development and in spreading openEHR across Latin America with the Chilean Association of Health Informatics (ACHISA).

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  Dr Erik Sundvall

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  Erik has an MSc in Information Technology and a PhD in Medical Informatics from Linköping University, Sweden. His recent work ties things together through an openEHR-based educational EHR system (LiU EEE), which provides a reusable patient overview and tests a scalable, REST-based openEHR component design that makes it easier to deploy openEHR systems from different vendors’ components. He has supervised many student projects and MSc theses, including one that led to the first openEHR archetype editor in Java.

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  Dr Xabier Michelena Vegas

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  Xabier 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, deployed EHRbase and explored ETL strategies aligned with OMOP. At CatSalut he works with an expert clinical modelling team on a unified, consensus-driven approach to structuring EHRs and orchestrating care processes across healthcare networks.

Expert Panel

Specialists who support the committee’s work.

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  Gašper Andrejc

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  Gašper is a Ljubljana-based health IT professional and founder of openFHIR, specialising in FHIR architectures and backend reliability. He combines software engineering expertise with strong technical writing, and his work spans APIs, integration workflows and validation practices, focusing on scalable, vendor-neutral systems that align interoperability with robust, future-ready data models.

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  Pieter Bos

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  Pieter has an MSc in computer science from the University of Twente and joined Nedap Healthcare in 2007, where he led the growth of a small time-registration app into a full elderly care suite, including an EHR. He is now responsible for the teams that build the administrative and financial parts of the Nedap EHR. In 2015 he introduced openEHR at Nedap. Finding that ADL 2 had clear advantages but lacked tooling, Nedap built its own and released it as the open-source library Archie, which Pieter maintains. Archie now underpins archetype editors, CDRs and client applications, with an international community of users and contributors. Pieter also led the development of an ADL 2 archetype editor based on Archie.

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  Christian Chevalley

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  Christian is R&D manager at ADOC Software Development, with over 30 years’ experience in software design, development, data centre architecture and IT security across finance, manufacturing, telecoms and healthcare. He specialises in distributed networked systems on UNIX/Linux and mainframes. He has focused on healthcare systems for many years, including point-of-care management for aged and acute care, telemedicine and care flow, and has developed the openEHR-based EtherCIS platform, including an open-source openEHR server, since 2010.

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  Kjetil Jørgensen

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  Kjetil is a product owner at DIPS ASA in Norway.

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  Borut Jures

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  Borut spent many years as a software architect and implementer of ERP systems before ‘accidentally’ finding openEHR. Since then he has built openEHR code generators, an ADL converter, an OPT data synthesiser and a FHIR-to-openEHR data mapping tool, and researched BPMN for clinical pathways. He now works on storing openEHR’s two-level modelled data in existing databases and letting users query it with SQL.

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  Dr Chunlan Ma

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  Chunlan is a gynaecologist and obstetrician who has developed openEHR-based APIs and applications for more than 15 years, with a particular interest in openEHR data reporting. She was the lead author of the openEHR AQL specification and has worked on an openEHR Reference Model implementation in C#, the RM schema, template-to-OPT transformation, HL7-to-openEHR transformation, and openEHR platform APIs and query engines. Her PhD, from the University of South Australia, was in computer-based patient education.

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  Dr Luis Marco-Ruiz

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  Luis is a data engineer at the HiGHmed consortium, focusing on the adoption of information standards and terminologies for clinical data reuse and clinical decision support. He holds an MSc in Applied Statistics and a PhD in Health Science. Since 2007 he has worked as a developer, adviser and researcher on projects in Norway, Germany, the UK and Spain. At the Norwegian Centre for E-health Research, which he joined in 2013, he develops national data reuse infrastructures and advises Norwegian health authorities on clinical information standards and biomedical ontologies. He is also a semantic interoperability specialist at the Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics at Hannover Medical School, building HiGHmed’s cross-institutional data reuse network.

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  Dr Sidharth Ramesh

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  A doctor by training but a developer at heart, Sidharth founded Medblocks in 2015, which serves customers around the world. Medblocks provides Medblocks UI, an open-source library for building openEHR interfaces, and Medblocks Stack, open-source backend services for building openEHR and FHIR applications, as well as consulting on openEHR, SNOMED CT and FHIR.

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  Jake Smolka

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  Jake has worked with openEHR since his studies. From 2018 to 2021 he worked at Hannover Medical School as part of HiGHmed, contributing to the development of EHRbase, and joined the SEC Expert Panel in April 2020. He then joined Better and designed the first version of the FHIR Connect specification. Since January 2024 he has been part of vitagroup’s integration team, improving compatibility and mapping between FHIR, HL7 v2 and openEHR.

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  Renaud Subiger

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  Renaud is a solutions architect with a passion for digital health and interoperability, who has designed and built systems in the Java ecosystem for over 17 years. Since 2016 he has worked on major healthcare projects including MyHealth@EU, NUM-CODEX and SiNCP, and taken part in IHE Connectathons, giving him wide knowledge of FHIR, openEHR, IHE profiles and DICOM. He contributes to the HAPI FHIR and EHRbase projects.

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  Alexandru Vidrean

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  Alexandru is a developer at heart who has worked in health tech for almost a decade. Based in Romania, he joined the EHRbase project as Product Owner in 2022, helping the team extend EHRbase across open-source and enterprise use. He joined the SEC Expert Panel in May 2023, driven by his belief in the power of open standards in healthcare.

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