openEHR is a non‑profit organisation that publishes technical standards for an EHR platform along with domain‑developed clinical models to define content.
The principal architectural concepts include the lifelong, patient‑centric shared health record, future‑proof data and clinical process support.
All openEHR IP is published under either Apache 2.0 or CC‑BY licenses.
Organisation Vision Intellectual Property
Domain professionals directly define the content and other semantics of implemented solutions rather than IT developers.
Application development may be largely be performed by low-code tools, enabling rapid development.
Interoperability is an automatic outcome of the platform architecture rather than an ad hoc case-by-case problem.
The platform approach enables a component-oriented healthcare IT economy, which enables flexible and incremental procurement.
The Specification Program develops and maintains the technical specifications of the openEHR platform.
The Clinical Program develops and publishes archetypes, templates, terminology subsets and guidelines for use in all healthcare IT.
The Software Program supports the software development based on, or related to, the openEHR specifications.
The Education Program develops and maintains the openEHR Body of Knowledge, an open resource for trainers and educators. It also manages training accreditation.
openEHR started in 2003 as an international collaboration to address the problems of poor data quality and inability of healthcare information systems to adapt to change. Today, the IP created by the openEHR community is managed and published for free by openEHR International, a non‑profit organisation.
Left: St Bartholomew's Hospital, where openEHR's progenitor project, the EU GEHR project was based in 1994
Our historyJoining openEHR can be gradual, we can support and guide you along the way. Our approach offers opportunity and value to many different stakeholders, including clinicians, health care providers, governments, software developers and research institutions.