At its October meeting in Toronto, the General Assembly of the IHTSDO received and discussed a proposal, submitted by its Management Board, to support, develop and maintain the IP in openEHR, within a broader framework of IHTSDO governance for clinical content of the electronic health record.
IHTSDO Decision
The openEHR Foundation Board has now heard from the IHTSDO Management Board, saying that, whilst the objective of the proposal was considered by the GA to be within the scope of the organisation and that it represented a pressing issue for their governments, it was unable to reach consensus that going forward with openEHR in this way is the right choice, at this time.
It confirmed its wish to continue a pathway of harmonisation with openEHR and expressed considerable appreciation for the work done in setting out the proposal, by the working group of Foundation and IHTSDO members. The pathway forward that they have chosen is the creation of an IHTSDO Task Force, to review the requirements for clinical content standardisation, afresh, and then proceed towards an open process for meeting those requirements, in which openEHR would be invited to participate.
This is disappointing from our perspective as we believed that the IHTSDO was a good organisation with which to partner, to provide the broader governance for developing and maintaining the openEHR specifications and related tooling that we have been seeking. We have been encouraged, in successive stages over two years, to actively engage in this dialogue to seek greater harmonisation between eHealth standards bodies. It is a time of financial hardship and the openEHR Foundation did seek a significant injection of funds into the specifications and tooling: this may have been a contributing factor in the decision. It was critical to the Board that this move did involve an injection of capital.
We much appreciate our close working links with many staff and members of IHTSDO, formed in the process of working with them to generate the proposal that has not, sadly, found favour at this time. A number have been long-standing and loyal advocates for what we are trying to achieve. These will, we hope, be maintained in the future, despite our pressing need to move forward independently. Despite the apparently negative outcome at this stage, we are minded to now look at the opportunities that are on offer to take the specifications forward.
The Future
The Foundation now needs to find a smarter way forward which continues to build the momentum behind openEHR and develops opportunities for members individually and collectively. We believe there is no doubt that the momentum for enabling eHealth platforms such as
Announcement concerning progress with IHTSDO and future directions
is growing: more people are realising the importance of a standard, tool-based approach to content definition and the distributed electronic health record. The health record is becoming an important asset for each citizen, for every provider and for the good of society.
The Foundation’s view is that standardisation of a knowledge-enabled EHR computing platform is a critically important step to support international efforts of healthcare reform; a step that will lead to genuine diversity of applications, empowerment of individuals and beneficial health outcomes. Health systems are under pressure, and a properly engineered, cost-effective and flexible platform is necessary.
The Foundation wishes to acknowledge that the future success of openEHR now clearly lies in the hands on the openEHR community itself. The Foundation is therefore seeking support for an international meeting to define and establish a new way of working. The meeting will discuss ideas about how to progress the work of openEHR and ensure that more people benefit from it. We would like to invite initial discussions on organising this meeting on the openEHR lists, which Sam Heard will moderate.
We sense there are a number of central requirements for moving forward and wish to seek the community’s opinion on next steps. These include:
- The potential for a new Consortium that owns and provides suitable governance for the oversight, IP and other assets of the Foundation – this might comprise professional organisations, universities and industry;
- Resources to ensure that information about openEHR continues to grow, specifications are maintained and the business of creating a standard health record platform that works continues;
- A collaborative ‘refresh’ and focussing of the aims and ambitions of the openEHR community;
- Practical engagement with clinical groups, through the Foundation and all its participants to ensure that the improvements sought by health services are supported by openEHR efforts;
- Maintenance of a lean and agile engineering approach that avoids expending time and effort without practical and incremental gain for the community;
- Alignment of the efforts of academia and industry around production of open source software tooling to support greater international collaboration and increased uptake of openEHR; and
- A roadmap to ensure that openEHR becomes a universal EHR – the record that can accept information from all current systems and can be implemented using the latest technological approaches.
Thank you for your patience during this extended period of uncertainty. We apologise for any difficulties and tensions this has created. We all have choices and we appreciate you may choose you to invest your energy and effort elsewhere. Rather, we hope that the aspirations and energy this community shares will drive us all forward to support and deliver the paradigm shift that is required in eHealth. We appreciate your support at this time.
December 2010
David Ingram, Sam Heard and Dipak Kalra for the openEHR Foundation