The Education Program develops and maintains the openEHR Body of Knowledge, serving as a resource for trainers and educators. It oversees training accreditation, produces educational materials for the e-health sector, and engages in advocacy, as well as working with national standards organisations to promote localised education and dissemination.
Mission: To take openEHR knowledge to the masses and build the openEHR skills the world needs. Vision:A health and social care industry which understands, trusts and adopts openEHR.
The Education Program is managed by the Education Program Board (EPB), and is formally governed according to the rules and guidelines in its Terms of Reference (ToR).
Recognition of openEHR educators Ensuring the skills of those providing openEHR / Education to deliver quality education Identify the roles and skills needed to undertake defined roles in digital health associated with openEHR – in progress – due for delivery late 2023
Manage delivery and certification individuals Ongoing professional development – based upon roles and skills project Establish material and maintain web information to clarify the openEHR use case and need for skills
education program board
Heather Grain
Co-Chair
Heather Grain
Co-Chair
Heather is a Consultant Terminologist, Data and EHR Implementation Specialist and Educator at Global eHealth Collaborative GEHCO.org Australia. Her professional background is within digital health education, a specialist working in academic and vocational training for organisations, professional bodies and governments around the world assisting in practical, safe, future focused system design and implementation and workforce skill development. Leadership positions current or held in the last 10 years with HL7 International, ISO TC215 Health Informatics Information Governance and Semantic Content, ISO TC249 Traditional Chinese Medicine, and SNOMED International (education).
Prof Hanna Pohjonen
Co-Chair
Prof Hanna Pohjonen
Co-Chair
Hanna is a healthcare IT consultant at Rosaldo Oy (her own consultancy company). She has worked in 30 different countries in Europe, North-America, Middle East and Asia; she is specialized in big regional and national healthcare IT/eHealth projects. She has an extensive market knowledge in the area. She has provided consultancy regarding healthcare information systems and IT architectures, vendor neutral archiving, data sharing (XDS, openEHR), shared workflow, data privacy and security services as well as innovative eHealth applications and services, especially across organizational and national borders. She has special experience in benchmarking, IT and procurement strategies and roadmaps, cost/benefit analyses in the whole life cycle of the eHealth investment, quality assurance, applying new innovative technologies, change management and development of new service models based on IT tools and services. Before consultancy she worked in research both in UK and Finland, hospital environment and healthcare financing. She also represented Finland in eHealth matters in the European Commission.
Prof Seref Arikan
Prof Seref Arikan
Seref Arikan is a software architect who has been working at Ocean Informatics UK since 2010. He started his professional career in 1997 as a freelance developer working on B2B and B2C solutions and has worked in various health IT companies since 2001, mostly in various R&D and product development roles. His work on openEHR started around 2002, while he was working for a hospital information system vendor. He has released various openEHR related software components and tools as open source in 2009, which were develop in relation to his PhD in medical informatics. Seref’s PhD, which he completed at UCL, CHIME, under the supervision of Professor David Ingram, is on the integration of openEHR specifications with Bayesian Networks for clinical decision support. He is currently in charge of development of various platform components at Ocean Informatics, with a focus on analytics, scalability and API development. His particular interest and most active research is on the implementation of openEHR persistence and relevant specifications such as AQL.
Prof Johan Gustav Bellika
Prof Johan Gustav Bellika
Professor Johan Gustav Bellika has worked in the intersection between medicine, medical research and informatics since 1992, when he joined the Department of Community Medicine at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. He has a master’s from 1997 and a Phd from 2006 in computer science from UiT The Arctic University of Norway. He has worked at the Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine at the University Hospital of North Norway since 1997. In the period between 2007 and 2013 he joined the department of computer science to teach and research in relation to the international master program in Telemedicine and e-health. He is now a professor in Medical informatics at the department of clinical medicine, Faculty of health sciences at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and the Norwegian Centre for E-health Research at the University hospital of North Norway. His current research focus is on technology to enable privacy-preserving reuse of health data and supporting a learning healthcare system. Prof. Bellika has contributed to more that 100 scientific publication in international journals and peer reviewed conferences. Prof. Bellika has extensive experience as supervisor for Master’s and PhD students and postdocs. He has also served in organizing and scientific committees for national and international conferences. Prof. Bellika is the CRIO (chief research informatics officer) for the Norwegian primary care research network called PraksisNett and is heading the work developing, implementing and operating the IT system part of the Norwegian research infrastructure for primary care.
Luis Marco-Ruiz
Luis Marco-Ruiz
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 Education Program Board.
David Moner
David Moner
David Moner is a Computer Engineer and PhD at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Spain. He is currently CTO and consultant on semantic interoperability and eHealth standards at openEHR Industry Partner VeraTech for Health. Previously, David worked as a full-time researcher in health information systems and EHR standards in UPV. Since 2005, David has focused on the practical application of health information standards and terminologies such as openEHR, ISO 13606, HL7 CDA, HL7 FHIR, CDISC ODM, SNOMED CT or LOINC. He has participated in more than 30 research and applied projects, and has more than 50 publications in this field, including his PhD thesis titled “Archetype development and governance methodologies for the electronic health record”. In the education area, David has given academic training about semantic interoperability and EHR standards in the Master of Biomedical Engineering of the UPV, in the Master of Medical Informatics of the University of Alcalá de Henares, and as part of medical informatics courses in the Computer Engineering degree of the UPV. He has also provided on-demand professional training in ISO 13606, openEHR, HL7 CDA, HL7 FHIR and SNOMED CT, having trained over 500 clinical and technical professionals in the use of these standards.
Pablo Pazos Gutierrez
Pablo Pazos Gutierrez
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).
educator recognition program
The openEHR Educator Recognition Programme validates expertise in openEHR education, ensuring high teaching standards and aligning workforce skills with industry needs. Recognised educators gain credibility and visibility, while organisations enhance their profile and confirm their educator competencies. It provides learners with trusted options and supports continuous improvement in openEHR teaching.
If you’re passionate about driving innovation in digital health, the openEHR fellowship program is your chance to enhance your skills and understanding, contribute to the openEHR community, and shape the future of healthcare interoperability.
what is the openEHR fellowship program?
Our program provides an exciting opportunity to build capacity and expertise within the openEHR ecosystem, across a broad range of areas of interest. So whether you’re passionate about clinical leadership, technical innovation, knowledge governance, or education and advocacy, there’s a place for you. You can find the full list of potential Fellowship projects in the link below.
key features of the program:
• Mentorship and guidance: Dedicated stream leads will mentor and supervise fellows throughout the year. • Collaboration: Access monthly meetings, an interactive discourse area, and educational sessions. • Real-world impact: Focus on projects that deliver tangible outcomes in areas such as clinical modeling, standards development, and technical innovation. • Recognition: Present your project at the year-end and graduate as an official openEHR Fellow.
Applications are now open, so submit yours and join the openEHR community in transforming healthcare.
