Hi all,
Just Wanted to know if there’s is a certification training/program for openehr?
Hi Alvin,
There have been some discussions abut formal openEHR training
accreditation but nothing concrete has emerged. The individual
companies like Ocean and Cabolabs that offer training can offer
certificates of attendance/training.
Ian
Hi Alvin,
We (CaboLabs.com) do openEHR training in spanish with ACHISA.org (Chilean Association of Healthcare Informatics. ACHISA gives a certificate from the association, but right now there is no formal certificate from openEHR itself. The course is online, and the fourth edition will start on April 2014. We have a waiting list for the course: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDlLUmpMX0pzaHJzZ21FMGVLN1dMUWc6MQ#gid=0
More info: http://informatica-medica.blogspot.com/2012/01/conclusiones-del-curso-de-openehr-en.html
As Ian said, Ocean gives training and certificates also, those instances are english-based. There are some videos of their training instances on YouTube. I totally recommend you to take a look at that.
Have a nice weekend!
We also provide training in openEHR with HL7 Brazil. This year we will provide the first Online course. We give also in company training.
The Brazilian Health informatics association has introduced a HIT professional certificate two years ago- ProTICS, where knowledge of clinical models Is one of the desired skills to a health informaticiN, but is generic. Openehr Brasil is trying to Building a certificate project, but we want that it could be internationally acknowledged, and the only way is pushing the foundation to tackle this issue. My suggestion is to create a SiG to organize that. I will propose this on next ínterim board meeting.
Volunteers?
Jussara
Enviado via iPad
Dear All,
In Chile, as part of Post graduate diplomas in the Centre of Health Informatics: openehr and HL7 are covered in the diploma of Health Informatics Standards. Also, there is a master program that is focusing in Semantic Interoperability as well.
The university is Central Uni. of Chile where the director is Erika Caballero with an internacional team giving totally online post graduate programs. In the future will be a PhD in this area.
Cheers Carol
Clearly there are many openEHR training providers. May I suggest that the openEHR foundation consider setting the standards that graduates of such training programs need to be able to comply with? This includes stating what competencies are needed for the various job roles but also how to certify trainers themselves to ensure quality and consistency. The openEHR Foundation could consider providing an endorsement mechanism for training organisations. An openEHR SIG could develop these standards.
Individual countries have their own system of regulating training/education quality based on educational standards. For example we are a registered training organisation (RTO) in Australia able to develop a curriculum that may be accredited by our national regulator who then approves us to issue an agreed nationally recognised qualification that fits with the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF). All Universities and other training providers need to comply with that. We also have specific requirements on how to write a competency standard – see http://www.nssc.natese.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/71303/TxtCompStandardSection.pdf
We have experience working with ITHSDO and HL7 regarding their certification programs. I also undertake accreditation of University ICT/SE programs for the Australian Computer Society and manage our RTO. We’re happy to participate.
Regards, Evelyn
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Hi Evelyn,
We had a long discussion a while ago (Jan 2012), we even created a wiki page, but we didn’t get further, IMO because we don’t have a clear view of the certification mechanisms from the foundation.
I’d love to see and participate in an openEHR SIG, but some questions arises:
Who will coordinate that? How do we engage people to participate? Who will validate the decisions of the SIG and make them formal? e.g. endorsed by openEHR foundation, who can participate? who has the right to say who has the knowledge and capability to be part of the SIG? I can continue 
but I think I mentioned these a lot of times and got no clear answer, so it seems I don’t ask the right questions, or maybe this is not the place to ask those question, or (I’m afraid of this last option) the foundation representatives doesn’t know the answers.
As an example, right now there are a lot of groups formally created for each programme, but we still don’t know what can we decide and how those decisions will be endorsed by the foundation. Also participation is erratic because our little free time available.
This is the exchange we had a while ago:
http://lists.openehr.org/pipermail/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/2012-January/006527.html
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Hi Pablo,
Many thanks for reminding us all about our previous discussions on this topic. I have just had a look at the openEHR Foundation Governance structure and suggest we propose the establishment of an Education/Training Program responsible to the openEHR Management Board who need to appoint a Program Leader (you may consider doing this? I’m happy to be your deputy to get it all started and operational). We need to generate suitable terms of reference to be agreed to by the openEHR Foundation Board. For example we need to work closely with the other Program leaders who should be able to assist in identifying some unique roles to get us started in a proper educationally sound manner. The focus needs to be on minimum core knowledge/skill requirements for each role. There needs to be a fair bit of flexibility in terms of how the training/education is delivered.
The biggest issue I see is funding, as we need someone to manage such a program, especially once the openEHR Foundation gets into a certification/licensing/accreditation program as this is heavily reliant on a proper governance structure. Also the competency standards themselves need to be maintained and updated from time to time. Australian has several Government funded Industry Skills Councils who take on these tasks. An alternative is for the openEHR Foundation to simply set the standards via its program and outsource the certification/accreditation process on a user pays basis. I guess we need to develop a business case? I’ll have a go at that. There are many issues to consider so documenting it in some organised way should assist the openEHR Foundation in their decision making.
Perhaps we can get Gov’t and other stakeholder funding as it is in their interest to have a suitably skilled workforce??? We should also explore grant opportunities.
Evelyn
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Hi Evelyn,
Many thanks for reminding us all about our previous discussions on this topic. I have just had a look at the openEHR Foundation Governance structure and suggest we propose the establishment of an Education/Training Program responsible to the openEHR Management Board
It’s a wonderful idea. We can start the proposal by setting a template structure like:
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context: why are we doing this? what do we think is missing? how the objectives will help to spread openEHR (spreading the work should a common objective of all the programmes)
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objectives: what can we improve?
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plan & methodology: what should we do to reach the objectives?
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conditions: what we need to make this happen? from the foundation, from the community, funding, endorsement, sponsorships, …
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time frame: when to start? when do we need to see results? (I would like to manage this as a project with concrete results and decisions taken in a constrained time frame)
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…
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who need to appoint a Program Leader (you may consider doing this? I’m happy to be your deputy to get it all started and operational).
I can do the job, but only if I’m endorsed by the foundation and the community. I would like to know what others think about this. I’m sure there are a lot of people more capable than me on organizing this kinds of things, I’m just a doer, not a politician nor a 100% academic guy
We need to generate suitable terms of reference to be agreed to by the openEHR Foundation Board. For example we need to work closely with the other Program leaders who should be able to assist in identifying some unique roles to get us started in a proper educationally sound manner.
Totally agree, e.g. localization is key on training, so we need to be close to the localization programme (right now we’re a little stuck there. Personally, I’m trying to coordinate some common actions with openEHR Brazil, where I’m acting as coordinator to the openEHR in spanish community).
The focus needs to be on minimum core knowledge/skill requirements for each role. There needs to be a fair bit of flexibility in terms of how the training/education is delivered.
Do you mean knowledge for people participating in the Education Programme ? Or the skill set a trainer should have? What are those “roles” you mention?
The biggest issue I see is funding, as we need someone to manage such a program, especially once the openEHR Foundation gets into a certification/licensing/accreditation program as this is heavily reliant on a proper governance structure. Also the competency standards themselves need to be maintained and updated from time to time. Australian has several Government funded Industry Skills Councils who take on these tasks. An alternative is for the openEHR Foundation to simply set the standards via its program and outsource the certification/accreditation process on a user pays basis. I guess we need to develop a business case? I’ll have a go at that. There are many issues to consider so documenting it in some organised way should assist the openEHR Foundation in their decision making.
IMO, the first step is to have a group of people interested in education and certification of openEHR related knowledge / skill sets, to create the programme. Then I think we need to come up with different educational levels (basic/introductory, intermediate, advanced, expert), different roles (clinical, informatician, project management, knowledge management, …), and the matching topics we consider should be taught to those roles, for each level (is a matrix).
Then we can analyze different kinds of educational sessions that can be done: workshops, master classes, courses (long/short), talks/presentations, … for each of these kinds we can propose some kind of formal certification from openEHR foundation.
Of course, we need to have a place to think about how and who will train trainers than can give those kinds of sessions, to get a certificate from openEHR foundation.
Then think about costs, funding, how the foundation will get money in interchange of endorsing the training instances and certifications, how much that will cost (IMO should be based on a %). But we can have courses in one hand, and exams in the other (is like when getting certified with PMP from PMI you pay for the course and for the exam).
Also, I think is key that we reach a common core of topics that should be taught in all the introductory/intermediate courses, then each educator can make local changes. But I don’t know if we can agree on having a common basic set of materials (presentations, documents, papers, practices, etc).
Perhaps we can get Gov’t and other stakeholder funding as it is in their interest to have a suitably skilled workforce??? We should also explore grant opportunities.
If there’s real interest of having a formal way of train and certificate students, I think all I mentioned before doesn’t need to be funded. I think is the investment we have to do to be endorsed by the foundation to train people. I would love to have an “openEHR foundation logo” on the openEHR course in spanish I’ve designed more than 4 years ago as an “openEHR foundation approved” course, and give certificates formally approved by openEHR foundation. I’m sure that can bring us to the next level in openEHR education. And I’m sure my course can be complemented by other courses, english based also! And I would love to recommend other “endorser by openEHR foundation” courses to my students, so they can improve their skills.
The main problem I see right now is how we engage openEHR boards to take action and decide on this things. Of course, presenting the proposal to create the programme committee will be the first step!
All the best,
Pablo.
Evelyn
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Prof Evelyn J.S.Hovenga, CEO, Director & Trainer |
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eHealth Education Pty Ltd, RTO 32279 : PO Box 9783, Frenchville Qld 4701
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Hi Pablo / Evelyn,
Some very good suggestions and proposals which I am sure the the Board would consider very carefully. There have been Board discussions about getting Training Certification established via an Academic Partnership group, but finding someone with the bandwidth to take this on has been difficult.
My main concern is resource and funding. Everyone has to remember that the Foundation currently operates with zero income stream, and even when we start to get Industry Partners membership fees, these will be tightly ring-fenced to support API / RM / tooling development.
It would be nice to think that the Foundation has resources to ‘invest’ in training certification but I do not see any immediate prospect of that being a reality. The only way that it is going to happen is if some individual / organisation sees setting up and running a training certification (endorsed by the Foundation) as a business opportunity.
I agree with Evelyn that this is not a trivial task, particularly trying to work on a global basis, with appropriate governance structures and making sure that the system works fairly. It would have to work so that the Certifying body took some sort of percentage of course fees but would need quite a bit of investment of time and money to set up.
I am not wholly convinced, at this point, that there is a big enough market in openEHR training (or enough providers) to make this a viable business, at least as a global activity. If there is local/regional interest, it might be possible to have training certification run on a regional basis, under the auspices of Localisation groups. This can also take advantage of local training certification/governance arrangements e.g in the UK there are some very tentative discussions to establish openEHR certification under the auspices of one of the UK Health informatics professional bodies. That seems to me much more managable.
In summary, if a proposal for a global openEHR training certification service was received by the Board, I am sure it would be looked on favourably, but I am pretty certain it would need to be self-funding and personally I am not convinced that there is a sufficient market for openEHR training to make this sort of service viable at an international level.
Sorry to sound negative but we do need to be realistic. The Board can offer support and ‘validation’ but realistically it is most unlikely to be able to offer investment.
Ian
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Dear All,
Evelyn´s suggestions are very valid: however, there is a large gap between the educationa standards and structures that exists in differents part of the world.
May be Pablo is right: this certification may need to comes from where the experts seats and works within an educational framework, and not necessarilly from the Foundation since there is not funds to do this type of work until now.
Certificacion or quality initiatives is used in differents terms for selling purposes rather than quality control of the contents of an education program where I have been working in developing countries; the quality culture has not developed yet.
Cheers Carol
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Hi Alvin,
As I told you SBIS, our health informatics association developed a certification program based on CPHIMSS. We worked together with COACH, the Canadian health informatics association, which has adapted the requirements to a country with a national health system and our program is very close to her. There are different profiles, one is for clinicians and knowledge of clinical models is one of the skills assessed in the tests. SBIS also supports a lot of trainings given in brazil, giving CME credits to a lot of training courses, which must comply to a set of requirements to have this status.
We haven’t submitted ours, but this year openEHR Brasil, openEHR. es ( Pablo), the Univeristy of oPorto, and two federal medicine universities are working togehter to develop a common and standard training to be used in portuguese and spanish speaking countries. After that our course could be either acknowledged by SBIS as a professional profile ( or more than one, like clinical modeller and openEHR architect) or we could try that the Foundation could give an international certification. I think both fit in our roadmap.
The government has also set grants for ehealth projects, training being one of them , but it is addressed to Universities and R&D organizations. I will talk with Domingo Alves, professor of Faculty of Medicine of Ribeirao Preto, who is very interested in academic projects involving openEHR. I think he could be engaged in this discussion and could help us to get funds to do this work. He recently organized a seminar focssed on semantic interoperability to build a cooperation project with Univeristy of oPorto and other universities. openEHR was one of the central threads there.
as Ian said, this a voluntary work, however, Brazil has adopted openEHR as the official EHR model and there are already a lot of projects using this approach. We need to train a lot of people in a short period of time, otherwise we can jeopardize the results we want to achieve. I think everyone in this community and the Foundation should be interested in our success here. I am personally involved in two big projects, the National EHR ( 200 MIO people) and one of the largest health plan in Brazil ( 18 MIO lives). Next month I and Gustavo will hikd a two days course to professionals of Sao Paulo City and the National primary care health record, eSUS AB, because they will be our pilot, They must learn how to record, exchange and query openEHR extracts and data in a short time. Most of them haven’t actually the slightest idea of it. It is a very hard work and a certification process to leverage their knowledge is a must to do in our country.
Pablo is a good name to lead the SIG but I think Koray, Shinji and Ricardo as academic members could help him to tackle this endeavour.
More thoughts?
Jussara
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Hi Everyone,
Just catching up with emails – I think the idea of training and certification is a great one but we need to kick start the new Programme structure before we commit to creating another one. So far apart from specifications work not much activity seems to be going on – including the Localisation Programme where I tried to get something started a couple of times but did not get Foundation’s support as they were rightfully busy with restructuring etc. I would suggest to restructure the Localisation Programme as Localisation and Education Programme. I’d expect much of the training will involve different locales and conversely localisation by definition includes training, certification etc. What do others think?
Cheers,
-koray
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Hi Everyone,
I have developed an entire business case and examined numerous options on how the openEHR Foundation could proceed with this.
It is based on an identified gap summarised as “a gap in trustworthy, quality and consistent openEHR international capacity building via formal or informal openEHR Foundation endorsed education/training opportunities”.
From a strategic perspective the foundation does need to address this if it wishes to maintain adherence to its 3 principles, rigour, engagement and trust.
[More Education about openEHR is needed, as I don’t see it mentioned in any national eHealth strategies, or the WHO eHealth documentation although the Regenstrief Institute gets a mention under SDOs on the basis of its LOINC for example]
[from my perspective effective education/training is not about an expert delivering a lecture or workshop using a powerpoint presentation, it needs to be educationally sound and targeted to achieve a specific measurable outcome]
I can send the entire business case to the Foundation for their consideration, [it’s too large to send to this list]. What is being proposed is a big project requiring substantial educational expertise with a lot of input from this community to set it up in a sustainable manner.
There are essentially 2 phases, phase 1 is about developing the standards/guidelines/criteria to be used as the basis for endorsing anyone or anything. This includes rules about the use of the Foundation’s logo. Phase 2 can’t be implemented until phase 1 is completed. Phase 1 is highly dependent upon participation from this community irrespective of funding. It needs to be based job/role evaluation/task analysis type of research. The first 2 recommendations relate to phase 1.
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Hi Everyone,
I have developed an entire business case and examined numerous options on how the openEHR Foundation could proceed with this.
It is based on an identified gap summarised as “a gap in trustworthy, quality and consistent openEHR international capacity building via formal or informal openEHR Foundation endorsed education/training opportunities”.
From a strategic perspective the foundation does need to address this if it wishes to maintain adherence to its 3 principles, rigour, engagement and trust.
[More Education about openEHR is needed, as I don’t see it mentioned in any national eHealth strategies, or the WHO eHealth documentation although the Regenstrief Institute gets a mention under SDOs on the basis of its LOINC for example]
[from my perspective effective education/training is not about an expert delivering a lecture or workshop using a powerpoint presentation, it needs to be educationally sound and targeted to achieve a specific measurable outcome]
I can send the entire business case to the Foundation for their consideration, [it’s too large to send to this list]. What is being proposed is a big project requiring substantial educational expertise with a lot of input from this community to set it up in a sustainable manner.
There are essentially 2 phases, phase 1 is about developing the standards/guidelines/criteria to be used as the basis for endorsing anyone or anything. This includes rules about the use of the Foundation’s logo. Phase 2 can’t be implemented until phase 1 is completed. Phase 1 is highly dependent upon participation from this community irrespective of funding. It needs to be based job/role evaluation/task analysis type of research. The first 2 recommendations relate to phase 1.
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Hi Everyone,
I have developed an entire business case and examined numerous options on how the openEHR Foundation could proceed with this.
It is based on an identified gap summarised as “a gap in trustworthy, quality and consistent openEHR international capacity building via formal or informal openEHR Foundation endorsed education/training opportunities”.
From a strategic perspective the foundation does need to address this if it wishes to maintain adherence to its 3 principles, rigour, engagement and trust.
[More Education about openEHR is needed, as I don’t see it mentioned in any national eHealth strategies, or the WHO eHealth documentation although the Regenstrief Institute gets a mention under SDOs on the basis of its LOINC for example]
[from my perspective effective education/training is not about an expert delivering a lecture or workshop using a powerpoint presentation, it needs to be educationally sound and targeted to achieve a specific measurable outcome]
I can send the entire business case to the Foundation for their consideration, [it’s too large to send to this list]. What is being proposed is a big project requiring substantial educational expertise with a lot of input from this community to set it up in a sustainable manner.
There are essentially 2 phases, phase 1 is about developing the standards/guidelines/criteria to be used as the basis for endorsing anyone or anything. This includes rules about the use of the Foundation’s logo. Phase 2 can’t be implemented until phase 1 is completed. Phase 1 is highly dependent upon participation from this community irrespective of funding. It needs to be based job/role evaluation/task analysis type of research. The first 2 recommendations relate to phase 1.
Hi Ian, I think I’m trying to solve a problem that is two steps before the funding problem.
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IMO the priority should be to define a criteria on the foundation, for minimum requirements to consider a training/educational proposal to be endorsed by the foundation.
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Doing this we can get to the next step: the board validation of each training/educational proposal.
Considering that almost 100% of the board members are actively involved in training, defining the criteria (1.) is something relatively easy and IMO we don’t need funding for that. If a proposal complies the criteria the we can go to the validation.
To validate proposals (2.) it might need more time of one or two board members. For doing this, who creates the proposal might pay a fee for the time of the reviewers, directly to them or through the foundation. Reviewing does not grant approval. Validation and approval might be a pre-instance to get endorsement by the foundation board. The foundation board should evaluate the validation and make the final approval.
IMO the fee paid for 2. should be based on the estimated income of the training/educational proposal.
Different kinds of endorsements / certifications should be issued to each proposal depending on the percentage of the training that is openEHR related. E.g. some courses include openEHR as one topic alongside with other 20, this might not be certified by the foundation but might be endorsed by it or at least supported by the foundation. In the other hand, courses 100% based on openEHR should be certified by the foundation.
Can we start defining the criteria (1.) to consider that a training proposal might be able to request evaluation for certification?
One small problem: since proposals will be locale-dependent not all board members will be capable of evaluating an ES or PT proposal. Anyone has an idea of how to solve that?
Maybe we should designate evaluators for each locale (?) If this is a good idea, we fall under the same problem: will the board designate those evaluators? with which criteria? (skills, knowledge, experience, community participation, …)
A good step 0 might be that the board defines the criteria to designate evaluators and then evaluators get together to define the evaluation criteria then validate that with the board (???)
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