It is a pleasure to record congratulations to our colleague of many years, Tony Shannon @tonyshannon on his appointment as Head of Digital Services in the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer of Ireland.
This completes a return home to Dublin for Tony and his family, after many years at Leeds, in England, as Consultant in Emergency Medicine of the principal hospital of that region.
openEHR could not have had a more dedicated and committed member and supporter, for which we owe him huge thanks and appreciation.
Our paths first crossed in the early days of the Foundation, as we thought through the combined efforts needed in the prototype architecture and clinical review boards. He quickly showed invaluable experience and understanding of the information needs of clinical care and strong focus on IT solutions that would make a difference. I recall an early visit to his emergency department, where he described the separate IT systems, sometimes as many as thirty, through which data for a patient brought to the hospital by ambulance would pass, during the course of their care.
Tony was an early strong advocate of open source software and helped Seref Arikan and me in the first open source openEHR platform, Opereffa, that we experimented with at UCL. His determined work to create a care record for use across the Leeds Metropolitan area, based on openEHR, combined with his busy clinical workload, was an amazing pioneering effort. In time this evolved into the Ethercis project that he pioneered with colleagues in the Ripple Foundation; the mission now being developed further in the EHRbase clinical data repository by private and public organisations like Vitagroup, Hannover Medical School and contributors from the openEHR community.
Inevitably with his government appointment, Tony has to leave us as a member of our community but we will not forget him and he tells me he will carry happy memories of openEHR community with him into the future. We send our very best wishes to him and his family.
David Ingram - October 16th, 2020
openEHR Foundation Board
