# 'Introduce Yourself' and 'What I'm Here For' **Category:** [Software Program](https://discourse.openehr.org/c/software-program/152) **Created:** 2026-02-19 10:02 UTC **Views:** 116 **Replies:** 5 **URL:** https://discourse.openehr.org/t/introduce-yourself-and-what-im-here-for/11760 --- ## Post #1 by @marcusbaw Following on from the Software Program Board initial kickoff meeting today, this topic is for community members to introduce themselves to the other members of the community and (as we didn't have time to get around everyone in the call today) perhaps mention what sort of things you are interested in seeing emerge from the work of the SPB. I imagine there will be a huge variation in backgrounds and ideas, and I think this represent a huge opportunity for openEHR to shift gears into a 'batteries included' platform. --- ## Post #2 by @Martin_Koch Hi everyone, my name is **Martin Koch** and I’m a **biomedical engineer** currently working for the **Catalan Health Service**. I’m here because in our team we **build custom software to support our clinical and modelling workflows** on top of openEHR. Over time we’ve realised that much of what we build could and should be **released as open source**, because: * it could help **other modellers** facing similar challenges, and * it could help **software vendors** better understand which functionalities their users are missing in current products. From working with the openEHR ecosystem, I’ve also noticed that there is already **a lot of valuable code and resources in the openEHR GitHub space** that are effectively “buried” because it’s not obvious how to find, use or integrate them. Examples include things like the **ANTLR4 parser for archetypes** or the **Reference Model in JSON format**: they are there, but not always easy to discover, understand, or apply in real projects. What I would love to see from the Software Program Board is a **stronger, more accessible platform**, almost like a **marketplace**, where: * end users and developers can **easily find applications, tools, and libraries** for specific purposes, * projects can **show concrete examples** and usage patterns, and * people can have **constructive discussions** around how to implement and evolve these tools. To give a flavour of what I’m working on: * **AQL Manager** – a tool to write, format and manage an AQL collection: [AQL Manager](https://martinkochdesign.github.io/openEHR_AQL_manager/) * **Archetype Companion** – my latest project, developed in the openEHR fellowship program, to make working with archetypes more approachable: [Archetype Companion](https://martinkochdesign.github.io/archetype_companion/) I’m very interested in helping make openEHR software and tooling **more discoverable, more usable, and more collaborative** for the whole community. --- ## Post #3 by @marcusbaw I'm Marcus Baw, I am a GP-turned-coder, or 'General Hacktitioner' as I like to call myself. I'm based in York, UK and previously have a wide clinical background ranging from anaesthesia to prison GP. I'm a clinical informatician, clinical safety officer, and software developer (Ruby, Python, Rust main languages, but increasingly LLM-driven development means I mainly write specifications in Markdown). Importantly for this group, I have a small regular paid ('mates rates' :smiley: ) commitment to provide openEHR sysadmin services which is mostly for forum/server maintenance & updates, admin, websites, github, etc.) I can use some of this time to support software development for openEHR, especially the official work that the SPB decides to have working groups work on. I'm here because I've always thought openEHR is a great idea but it lacks that 'batteries included' immediate developer usability, and implementation has such a steep learning curve that it is not really feasible unless part of a large organisation. We can make that better. I also feel we could be building and sharing more open source stuff directly from the openEHR organisation for everyone to benefit from. Click this button to set your Watching notification status for the #software-program category and always get notifications of activity here. Watch this category --- ## Post #4 by @james-a3 Hi all, I’m James Shelbourne, Chief Engineer at Avenue3, a tech consultancy based in Leeds specialising in modern health‑tech solutions. I spend most of my time helping teams design and build reliable systems in regulated environments. My background spans healthcare, education, telecoms, finance, government and defence, and I’ve worked across a range of technology stacks — mainly .NET, JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Angular, Infrastructure‑as‑Code (Terraform, etc.), and various SQL platforms. Over the years I’ve picked up a fairly broad mix of tooling, which helps me bridge the gaps between engineering, architecture and delivery teams. From our initial discussion last week, I’m very much aligned with the themes others have mentioned. I think one of the biggest early wins would be making documentation clearer, easier to navigate, and more approachable for new starters, along with improving the onboarding tooling and experience. Internally, we’ve built tooling to streamline our development cycle so we can focus more on domain logic rather than on the implementation details of openEHR itself. I imagine others may have developed similar approaches, so perhaps there’s an opportunity to consolidate or share ideas here. Looking forward to getting involved and helping wherever I can. --- ## Post #5 by @kathir_k **I am Kathiresan Kaliyaperumal (Short Name Kathir)** as a global health‑tech leader with more than a decade of experience building interoperable digital health ecosystems and over twenty years in enterprise digital transformation across cloud, AI, and partner ecosystems with better.care . Founder of Ezovion and currently serves as Managing Director & President – Global GTM at Quantum Nexis, a wholly owned subsidiary of HCTI Group (Nasdaq‑listed). Has led multi‑country healthcare transformation initiatives across MEA, Europe, India, and Southeast Asia, architecting next‑generation HIS platforms, AI‑enabled clinical intelligence, and national health data exchange models. His work spans EMR, RCM, CDSS, RPM, mental health platforms, and GenAI‑powered automation. A strong advocate for open standards, driving Quantum Nexis’ platform strategy toward openEHR‑aligned CDR adoption and promoting openEHR principles within partner ecosystems including Microsoft ISV, Better.care, and HCTI. Participated in the openEHR 2025 Annual Meeting & conference in Barcelona and actively contributes to interoperability frameworks combining openEHR and FHIR. mY mission is to help nations build safe, interoperable, and future‑proof clinical data ecosystems through the convergence of standards, AI, and real‑world healthcare transformation --- ## Post #6 by @pablo Hi all, sorry I couldn't be in the kickoff (impossible time zone for me). I'm Pablo, I'm a Computer Engineer from Uruguay, working as consultant, educator and integration engineer on projects related to clinical data modeling, management and exchange, especially focused on using standards (protocols, formats, apis, etc). I've been developing openEHR-related software for the last 20 years. Started in 2006 implementing the RM and archetypes in a ICU EMR, then developed a trauma EHR in 2009 with autogenerated GUI and clinical flows based on archetypes, with generic archetype-based persistence. That experience lead to improving the persistence/query side, now based on templates, to develop EHRServer which was released as the first open source openEHR-compliant CDR in 2013, which helped thousands of students and professionals to start working with openEHR. Around 2013/2014 I also released the first openEHR SDK (which was used by EHRServer). In 2017 I released the openEHR Toolkit (https://toolkit.cabolabs.com/) which is a web app that uses the openEHR SDK to help working with openEHR artifacts (manages templates and archetypes, generates JSON instances, does schema and template validation, etc). And around 2020 I started offering Atomik (https://atomik.app/) which is the evolution of the EHRServer, and handles demographics, EHR merge/unmerge, has some reports, does patient dup detection, supports attestations, etc. From 2011 I've been providing training and education around openEHR (offered the first online openEHR course in Spanish and English) and had hundreds of students on different areas (Foundation, Clinical Modeling, Software Development with openEHR, EHRServer Management, Clinical Data Repository design and implementation with openEHR, etc.). Recently refactored the openEHR SDK and separated the CLI part to another project, so projects could use the SDK as a library and the CLI as an app, independently. The CLI also includes an MCP server for LLM integration. More about this https://discourse.openehr.org/t/new-open-source-tool-for-openehr-openehr-cli/11807 From 2012 I started my own company, CaboLabs, from which I help other bigger companies on topics related to openEHR, DICOM, HL7 v2.x, FHIR, etc. Fun fact: I actually started my clinical informatics career with openEHR and learned all the basics from studying its specs, so I'm very grateful towards the openEHR specs, the community (which was smaller back then) and the giants that back in 2002 led to the publication of the first specs that I was able to learn from in 2006. I remember printing out ADL files to read offline, nice memories... I guess I'm here because of my obvious interest in openEHR-based software, but specially to find points of collaboration, exploration and innovation in that area, and to try to overcome the limitations / friction points of existing software, to help improving our tools. --- **Canonical:** https://discourse.openehr.org/t/introduce-yourself-and-what-im-here-for/11760 **Original content:** https://discourse.openehr.org/t/introduce-yourself-and-what-im-here-for/11760