HL7 International and openEHR International are pleased to inform our collective communities that we are jointly considering aligning some of our standards and specifications for the global good. We believe that this will be beneficial for: The digital health ecosystem: in the long term, having some aspects of openEHR co-published as HL7 standards will deliver clarity and harmony. This will increase the choices and power of software as an inevitable outcome is demonstrating how the specifications work together more completely than has been done previously. The openEHR community: by gaining additional community, alignment of formal adoption processes, and availability of shared conformance, compliance, publication tools and processes The HL7 community: by leveraging openEHR’s open collaborative culture, platforms, and people - particularly the clinical community - an extensive clinical model library, clinical modelling methodology, elements of the specifications and the value provided by better integration of tooling and modelling between the communities We appreciate that this news may surprise some of you, and we recognise that there will be questions on how we can best work together. The questions we have already posed ourselves include: Which openEHR specifications are appropriate to benefit from an HL7 driven standardisation process? Initial potential candidates include IPS and EHDS. Can we create a path through HL7 that meets openEHR’s standardisation needs, but works for an already existing community with a different geographical distribution and a different core requirement than HL7’s existing community? Can HL7 create a path that meets its standards obligations, and works for the existing openEHR community that has a different geographical distribution and different core needs? Where we believe mutual value can be achieved in the alignment or reconciliation of openEHR and HL7 standards and specifications, how can we achieve that? How do we describe the process? How does the ecosystem benefit? Can (and should) we introduce more formal standardisation for some parts of openEHR and is this possible without harming the proven openEHR culture of open innovation? Can (and should) we introduce some aspects of openEHR methodology to HL7 without compromising a well-established standards process? Given the effort and commitment that this will take, and a need for ongoing activities such as standards maintenance, is there a lasting benefit for both our communities? We do not have any formal agreement at this time, or even any certainty that we can overcome these challenges. We are announcing our intention to explore a closer collaboration. Both openEHR and HL7 are open communities; our true value is that openness and having a transparent dialogue. We must not consider these matters without involving you, which is why we’re letting you know that we’re looking at this, and asking you for your input. If we together decide to move forward, whatever we do will take time to build trust, develop approaches, and deliver outcomes. Please do provide your honest feedback - in the spirit of working together towards our shared vision of an enhanced digital health ecosystem. Indeed, we anticipate and look forward to getting many comments! Thank you for your time, and considering this next step in the future of both our organisations. Best wishes Rachel and Chuck rachel.dunscombe@openehr.org cjaffe@hl7.org

An announcement to the announcement is good enough @grahamegrieve ! Long journey yes but best done together…

I would expect that generating some derived reference materials from CKM archetypes could be one of the first steps, such as having the internal archetype subsets expressed as FHIR valuesets for their consumption https://linkehr.veratech.es/fhir/ Some first steps as deciding the base namespace of the openEHR artifacts for reference by FHIR logical models could help quite a bit in the homogenization of implementations

[image] Pete_Bouvier: HL7 International and openEHR International are pleased to inform our collective communities that we are jointly considering aligning some of our standards and specifications for the global good. We believe that this will be beneficial for: The digital health ecosystem: in the long term, having some aspects of openEHR co-published as HL7 standards will deliver clarity and harmony. This will increase the choices and power of software as an inevitable outcome is demonstrating how the specifications work together more completely than has been done previously. The openEHR community: by gaining additional community, alignment of formal adoption processes, and availability of shared conformance, compliance, publication tools and processes The HL7 community: by leveraging openEHR’s open collaborative culture, platforms, and people - particularly the clinical community - an extensive clinical model library, clinical modelling methodology, elements of the specifications and the value provided by better integration of tooling and modelling between the communities We appreciate that this news may surprise some of you, and we recognise that there will be questions on how we can best work together. The questions we have already posed ourselves include: Which openEHR specifications are appropriate to benefit from an HL7 driven standardisation process? Initial potential candidates include IPS and EHDS. Can we create a path through HL7 that meets openEHR’s standardisation needs, but works for an already existing community with a different geographical distribution and a different core requirement than HL7’s existing community? Can HL7 create a path that meets its standards obligations, and works for the existing openEHR community that has a different geographical distribution and different core needs? Where we believe mutual value can be achieved in the alignment or reconciliation of openEHR and HL7 standards and specifications, how can we achieve that? How do we describe the process? How does the ecosystem benefit? Can (and should) we introduce more formal standardisation for some parts of openEHR and is this possible without harming the proven openEHR culture of open innovation? Can (and should) we introduce some aspects of openEHR methodology to HL7 without compromising a well-established standards process? Given the effort and commitment that this will take, and a need for ongoing activities such as standards maintenance, is there a lasting benefit for both our communities? We do not have any formal agreement at this time, or even any certainty that we can overcome these challenges. We are announcing our intention to explore a closer collaboration. Both openEHR and HL7 are open communities; our true value is that openness and having a transparent dialogue. We must not consider these matters without involving you, which is why we’re letting you know that we’re looking at this, and asking you for your input. If we together decide to move forward, whatever we do will take time to build trust, develop approaches, and deliver outcomes. Please do provide your honest feedback - in the spirit of working together towards our shared vision of an enhanced digital health ecosystem. Indeed, we anticipate and look forward to getting many comments! Thank you for your time, and considering this next step in the future of both our organisations. Best wishes Rachel and Chuck rachel.dunscombe@openehr.org cjaffe@hl7.org Thank you Grahame and the HL7 team for the great discussions and setting off on such a positive footing. Looking forward to making open standards easier to deploy in health systems with you.

I am so happy and proud this is becoming reality! I look very much forward to collaboration. Remko Schats, MD PhD MBA

This is great news. The community welcomes this. Looking forward to the unified future or standards. As an implementor, we’ve felt the pain over the years of trying to bridge the knowledge gap amongst our teams.

One thing that could really help this along would be to have the two respective online communities (chat.fhir.org and discourse.openehr.org) connected formally. This could be done as a (relatively) simple one-way limited integration between Zulip and Discourse using RSS, or a more comprehensive and effective implementation of ActivityPub using this: [image] ActivityPub Plugin plugin experimental activitypub :discourse2: Summary Discourse ActivityPub allows you to publish Discourse posts via ActivityPub so they can be read on services that support ActivityPub such as Mastodon. 🛠 Repository Link GitHub - discourse/discourse-activity-pub: Adds... Reading time: 59 mins 🕑 Likes: 500 ❤ However, this would require HL7 to move to its mothballed Discourse instance (http://community.fhir.org/), which likely be highly painful for them. Would be worth doing if this collaboration has the potential to be revolution inducing, though.

Funny, I was just checking the fhir char for openEHR messages around this announcement. Could we set up two one way channels? E.g. an openEHR discourse topic that ‘reposts’ all messages from a specific fhir chat channel. And a fhir chat channel that ‘reposts’ all messages from a specific discourse topic? I like discourse much more than zullip, so I can definitely recommend it to the FHIR community. But I’m afraid suggesting fhir moves to discourse in order to communicate with openehr is a bit too bit a trigger for a meta level standards war :stuck_out_tongue:

On the HL7 Zulip there’s a Zulip channel - you could reach out to the Zulip team to see what their plans re synchronization are. The HL7 Zulip has 28k users, so a switch to any other platform is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Having ActivityPub support in such forums would be a very nice feature. With best regards, -Rene

I would say no to that. I don’t think HL7 and openEHR are that tightly coupled, we’ve already seen issues where X has a information model focus (openEHR and FHIR Profiles) and Y has process/workflow focus (FHIR API and IHE). I’d be worried that these types of users are coming from different contexts and we’ve already had issues around context.

[image] Nathan: a more comprehensive and effective implementation of ActivityPub using this: I think an ActivityPub link for discourse would be a great feature in any case. That would also allow people to get notified of (and in time maybe also follow and participate in?) discussions from Mastodon and other Fediverse services :heart_eyes:

openEHR and HL7 Joint Announcement

openEHR news

joostholslag (Joost Holslag) 20 July 2024 14:39 36

Lets follow up this specific discussion here: connecting FHIR and openEHR

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openEHR and HL7 Joint Announcement

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