openEHR model licensing with vendors and partners

General Discussion
1

Hi all,

I’m currently dealing with licensing questions around data models (archetypes/templates), particularly in cases where models are provided by vendors or partners, or created collaboratively, rather than being open source or developed entirely in-house.

In a recent project, we worked on models with external partners.

What concerns me:

  • Models may be seen as part of vendor/software IP rather than independent artefacts
  • In reality, models will probably always outlive the software they were built with
  • The need share models with other institutions may arise (e.g. for interoperability and data exchange)

So I’m wondering:

  • Is it common to ensure in contracts that models can be used independently of the software and indefinitely?
  • Do vendors typically tie model usage to an active software contract?
  • Can vendors even restrict the continued use of a model?
  • In joint development, can one party later restrict continued use or sharing of the model?

Any practical experiences would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

2

Yes, pretty much you need to include all of that in the contracts, since models are like other deliverables: software, documentation, etc.

So you need to be sure those are mentioned in the contracts and rules are clear for all involved parties.

3

These are great questions.

We have worked with a significant range of vendors/healthcare organisations and I cannot recall a vendor ever ‘blocking’ reuse of new models that are developed, bearing in mind that not every new model that is developed locally is suitable to be shared more widely.

Whilst there is an expectation that applicable models will be shared to the wider community, there is nothing in openEHR that says a new model created by a company or organisation must be shared with an open licence, unless it is derived from an existing openEHR copyright model.

A much bigger problem is that procuring health care organisations are often not used to dealing with the kind of federated governance/ open-source licensing world that we envisage. They worry about ‘paying’ for work that is ‘given away’, of legal responsibility for errors, or just don’t like not having a sole ‘vendor’ who makes all this pain go away.

I agree that it would be better to make all of the requirements and expectations clear ‘up-front’, but I can also understand why a vendor might be reluctant to have those conversations during procurement as it may actually be a barrier to winning a bid, particularly when the healthcare organisation just ‘wants a product’ and is not bought into ‘open standards’ as such.

4

Thank you Pablo & Ian for the replies, really helpful.

Good to know this is usually not an issue in practice, though we’ll still need to look carefully at the contractual aspects with partners.

The point about organisations not being comfortable with the open/federated model was interesting, I wouldn’t have expected that.

5

That may be a uniquely UK NHS issue. There are certainly some organisations that embrace ‘open’ at management level but there are others that get uncomfortable outside a traditional consumer-vendor relationship and trying to resolve that during procurement can be counter productive.