What a fantastic event the openEHRNL team put together last Friday. For me, it was a great opportunity to learn from fresh content, progress to celebrate, and true global collaboration. Reflecting on the event, I have three take aways:
- The use of openEHR to provide data is increasingly important for us in the future. Erik Vermeulen’s talk on how we need great data for AI highlighted this. Together, we need to ensure that well-engineered longitudinal records are possible across health systems to power the models of care for the future. This is a global need, and it was fantastic to see players from the Netherlands recognising this and globally collaborating.
- Communities of practice with the right governance to enable them allows convergence, not divergence. Dr. Heather Leslie explored how communities should work together and where the local, national, and international should play. Without these communities constructed correctly, we do not achieve the potential of openEHR. As the number of nations and regions embracing this grows, we need to support them with the right environment to allow openEHR to be standardised but flexible to local need.
- The open-source nature of what we are doing together is a combination of clinical models and supporting open-source software. Birger Haarbrandt’s exploration of EHRbase, the one source openEHR CDR, how it has progressed, and the value it adds remind us that health systems’ first entry point can be to use and explore these open tools. Prof. David Ingram’s book launch at the end of the event under the one publishing principles shows the power of democratising information and knowledge. I certainly had some great discussions around business models around open commons and how they differ from closed models.
Overall, the event was amazing – my thanks and congratulations to the whole openEHRNL team. This was for me community at its best, and I hope we can use this as a template for future affiliate events.
Rachel Dunscombe, CEO
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