Hi Pablo,
Firstly, I will be at MEDinfo2015 and would definitely hope to contribute some of the very interesting stuff emerging from HANDI-HOPD.
I do recall our conversation about training and accreditation. Although I am on the Board, my response here is personal, not official!
What you are suggesting is a very good idea, and was discussed further at the Oslo meeting. We know that a number of organisations around the world are now running openEHR related training, we know that trainees frequently ask for accreditation and trainers also see benefits in being able to claim they are ‘openEHR accredited’. So if the Board was asked, “is this a good idea”, I am sure you would get a positive answer.
However a whole number of questions follow …
Is the organisation accredited or the course accredited?
Who decides the criteria for accreditation of a course?
Does every small variant of a course need accredited?
Who checks the course content? In multiple languages?
What are the rules of withdrawing accreditation?
Who pays for all of the above?
How do we ensure that anything that is decided is fair to both existing trainers and to new entrants and how do we ensure that this system is seen to be fair and transparent and not open to abuse.
I am sure there are many more questions, and, of course there are solutions. Other organisations have faced similar problems and come up with answers that we can almost certainly use or adapt.
So, it is doable, but who does it? Who puts in the work and effort to consult with current training organisations, speak to the broader membership, also other organisations what they do etc, etc? Who comes up with a final proposal to submit to the Board that if seen to be fair and sensible will almost cvertainly by ‘rubber-stamped’.
In my view the only people who can do this are those of us who have a commercial or academic interest in training. It is in our interest to have accrediation working - it is something demanded by our customers, and in our commercial interest. We are the ones with the knowledge of what it takes to be a good openEHR course, the ones who stand to lose if the proposals are done favour a competitor, and the only ones who can give up some of our IP, if the idea is to share some ‘standard’ resources.
The Board simply has no capacity to do the ground work here, and in any case that would be inappropriate. Their job is to ratify (or not) a set of proposals coming from the training industry, in exactly the same way that the System Accreditation proposals will have to come from System developers like yourself.
I believe that Heather Leslie and Evelyn Hovenga have been working on some ideas in this area - it might be worth contacting them to see if this could be the nexus of a ‘Training Partners Group’.
I am having a similar conversation elsewhere about Localisation. There have been private conversations about localisation and Koray posted a very detailed proposal but that is not enough, there needs to be input from other localisation groups so that openEHR can come up with a minimum but clear set of criteria for localisation. That takes work and discussion with the various parties around the world who have an interest in this area, but it does have to member-led.
In the coming months, the interim Board will be replaced by an Elected Board (everyone who wants to vote or be nominated should sign up at members.openehr.org) but even then, the level of funding and personal resource that will available, will require Foundation resources to be concentrated on core communications and ‘marketing’ of openEHR.
As I say just my view. Others may feel that openEHR should have much more central power and resource to drive these important and necessary efforts but they will then have to figure out how it gets funded.
I will leave my thoughts on Standards to a different post but remember that there was a major effort led by David and Sam to have openEHR become part of IHTSDO. This went a long way but was ultimately rejected byt the IHTSDO board. I suspect that will not be the end of the story.
Ian
- thomas
