Fact-checking a report statement about openEHR application portability

Implementation
1

Hi!

I am reading a Swedish report about future national e-health infrastructure and need help to check the degree of truth in a reference-less statement about openEHR in the context of utopia vs real interoperabilty. The Swedish statement “ingen större aktör ännu har gjort ett fullständigt byte av applikationsleverantör inom en openEHR-baserad journalsysteminfrastruktur” roughly translates to “no major player has yet made a complete change of application vendor within an openEHR-based record system infrastructure”.

Is that really true or are there any interesting counterexamples?

I know DIPS and others have changed techincal CDR solutions several times without having to change application code, but the statement considers the other way around, has anybody brought along their openEHR data entered in one vendor’s application when shifting over to another vendor’s application?

I guess theoretically the core issue above is analogous to multi-vendor / multi-caregiver networks exchanging information using openEHR. Then you do not make a local “change of application vendor” but the data is certainly used by applications from different vendors - which can be considered equvalent. Are there good examples of that?

Of course there needs to be some form of coordination in the practical application of any standard (no matter if it is openEHR, FHIR or anything else) if you want seamless data portability between applications, so another way of looking at the question is to what degree that has happened in some different “major player” cases.

2

I don’t think that’s true. Marand (which Better spun off from) implemented a hospital information management system for a pediatric hospital (in Java) using the Ocean platform (Dotnet) via web services we provided them (WSDL/SOAP) , went operational, then developed their own platform and switched the whole HIS to theirs in a year or more. I’ll have to point you towards them for further details. I’m happy to be corrected if my memory is failing me.

I don’t have an issue suggesting that this is real life evidence of switching between openEHR platform vendors, with an operational system in place.

2 Likes
3

@Simon at Future Perfect has some recent experience of a bulk Better → EhrBase migration.

1 Like
4

I know that’s definitely no longer true as we have exported and imported hundreds of thousands of compositions from one vendor to another. The project is now completed and live. We are currently writing up our experiences to make sure everyone in the community is aware of what we at Future Perfect achieved.

4 Likes
5

Cool @Simon! Are the applications using the data, or the CDR, or both, from a new vendor?

6

If you mean the application consuming the data from the CDR then we haven’t changed vendor because that’s me. We have changed CDR vendor though :wink:

Apologies for the confusion.

7

Does anybody want to briefly share more examples of when multiple applications from multiple vendors/actor use the same CDR?

8

The main one we have been involved with is SNEE-ROSI - an End of life care planning application in England where there are currently 2 apps, both read/writing to a CDR (Better) via an openEHR API. It has been built and is due for deployment early next year.

  1. A professional app developed using Better Studio.

  2. A personal app built by Cohesion medical, a small Scottish company which reads and writes to the CDR directly via the API.

2 Likes
9

During openEHR conference this year, @Sidharth_Ramesh had a demo presentation on SMART specs ported to openEHR (still in draft) where two vendors build two apps separately, but based on the same template, and they run against same CDR (EHRbase+flat) & platform. Although this is still in an early stage of development, I think it looks very promising.