Possibly of interest to the openEHR Community as a potential source of standards and solutions to assist with the Healthcare Archival problem.
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is hosting an open meeting to address some of the challenges surrounding healthcare data and healthcare archiving – and we would like to invite you to participate.
The DPC is an international charitable foundation which supports digital preservation, helping its members around the world to deliver resilient long-term access to digital content and services through community engagement, targeted advocacy work, training and workforce development, capacity building, good practice and standards, and through good management and governance. Our vision is a secure digital legacy.
Digital Healthcare Archival is an area in which very little work has been done, and ‘Electronic Hospital and Medical Records’ is listed as ‘Endangered’ on the DPC’s ‘Bit List’ of endangered unarchived data:
Electronic Hospital and Medical Records
“and yet there is little evidence of the medical profession participating in the digital preservation community.”
I became aware of the DPC via a contact in the National Archives, and started a conversation with them to initiate some action on archival across digital health and technology. This is the first meeting in that initial action.
The meeting will take place online, on Thursday 20th November 2025, 11:30 - 13:00 via Zoom, and will aim to cover the following points:
Agenda:
- Defining the Scope of the Healthcare Archives Challenge
- Identify specific gaps in current healthcare archiving practices (e.g. absence of long-term storage, lack of metadata standards).
- Categorise archival use-cases e.g. direct patient care (e.g. continuity of treatment); clinical and academic research; legal, regulatory, and historical record-keeping.
- Evidence gathering:
- Case studies or examples of archival failures or risks
- Data on volume and types of unarchived healthcare records
- Stakeholder feedback (clinicians, IT, archivists)
- Exploration of Potential Solutions
- Identifying and engaging stakeholders to understand barriers (technical, financial, legal, political)
- Existing tools and frameworks that could be adapted or scaled
- Assess feasibility of implementing archival standards across healthcare systems
- Define success criteria for effective healthcare archiving
- Developing a Roadmap for Change
- Short-term (0–6 months) / Medium-term (6–18 months) / Long-term vision (18+ months)
To attend please register for a free place here
https://buytickets.at/dpc/1900541
If you are unable to attend but would like to send a colleague in your place, that is no problem at all – please just ask them to RSVP as above.
We look forward to hearing from you.