Foundation

March

New Management Board - following individual members and industry partners votes, the candidates elected to the new Management Board were:-

Individual Members:

Ian McNicoll, UK
Koray Atalag, NZ 

Industry Partners:

Tomaz Gornik, Marand, Slovenia
Rong Chen, Cambio, Sweden 

The Management Board set out the direction and make day to day decisions in regard to the activities of the openEHR community and Foundation. 

April

openEHR Programs Guidelines – Koray started work on drafting ideas / guidelines around how the openEHR programs could operate and share some common processes in a bid to support them to get program activities underway and with engagement of the wider community. This document was produced and finalised. 

April

Clinical Models Program - Heather Leslie and Silje Ljosland Bakke were appointed as joint leads of the Clinical Models Program 

June

Localisation Program - Shinji Kobayashi and Gustavo Bacelar were appointed as joint leads of the Localisation Program. 

June / July

New Education Program - Pablo Pazos and Evelyn Hovenga agreed to be joint leads of this new group.   

The group will look to build a community of practitioners with an academic or commercial interest in providing openEHR training and education, to include formal education. 

It will also look at opportunities to share and make public a set of free introductory training materials and resources plus advise the Foundation on possible approaches to formal accreditation of courses and trainers, including options for funding the accreditation process. 

June / July

Foundation IP Licensing - Heather Leslie, Sebastian Garde and Ian McNicoll have completed discussions with IHTSDO about licensing implications of using SNOMED CT terms within archetypes, in line with other groups such as CIMI, FHIR and a joint agreement is back with IHTSDO for consideration. 

September

Branding – It had been suggested that it might be worth looking at our current logo and how it might be improved for printing and other media use. This has been looked at and options are being considered.

October

openEHR released a new White Paper describing an open, vendor-neutral semantic platform-based future for health computing.  The White Paper describes how a health computing platform built around openEHR offers the most comprehensive semantic framework available in e-health, combining formal clinical modelling, terminology, and a services infrastructure, lowering the costs to market for new eHealth innovators, involving clinical stakeholders directly in content development, and preventing vendor lock-in. 

October

Intellectual Property - The licenses governing the Intellectual Property (IP) of the openEHR Foundation need to be modernised and reviewed. The IP status of archetypes has also been raised as a potential issue. Ian contacted Silje and Eric to review options and produce a short paper with recommendations about what to do, if anything.  Ongoing. 

October / November

Terms of Reference Document for Ambassador Roles – drafted and completed by Koray and signed off November. 

Industry Partners

August

New Industry Partners - We welcomed new Industry Partners to membership:- Infinnity Solutions Ltd, Evgeny Agafonov and BPAC inc, Eric Robertson. 

Sept /Oct

VPHi Collaboration - The Foundation and the Virtual Physiological Human Institute  (VPHi) are looking at ways to collaborate and establish a strategic partnership for positioning openEHR as the underpinning semantic bridge between computational physiology and clinical data.  This approach has the potential to open up new raft of personalised clinical decision support tools and make in-silico clinical trials possible. 

October

CIMI and External Sharing of Information – CIMI became part of HL7, and we contacted HL7 to ask how non-HL7 groups that were not members of HL7 were to continue to work with CIMI.  CIMI members to continue as previously. Balloting rights are to be worked out by HL7.

November

Industry Partners Mailing List –an Industry Partners mailing list is being considered.  There is likely to be some overlap with other lists.  This is still being looked at.

Engagement

19 – 23 August

Medinfo Event - openEHR supported the Medinfo 2015 event held in Sāo Paulo, Brazil as a Silver Sponsor. Having a stand at the event was a first for openEHR and very successful, and it is planned to have an increasing presence at events like this in future, including the next MIE conference in München Aug 2016 .  

The openEHR Medinfo2015 wiki page is  HERE and contains links to the papers, presentations and posters that we have been able to acquire. A report from Prof. David Ingram along with some photos taken at the event can be viewed HERE. 

12^th November

NHS England Code4Health / Apperta Foundation openEHR Event – We were involved with the first NHS England Code4Health / Apperta Foundation learning event, at which David Ingram made a guest appearance. 

Technical / Clinical

May

Specifications – A successful Specifications Editorial Committee (SEC) meeting took place in Alkmaar, NL, kindly hosted at the offices of Code24. Meeting report here.

May

FHIR-openEHR MAPPINGS - Basic dialogue commenced re FHIR-openEHR being mapped together. Koray is experimenting with Grahame Grieve using Condition Resource <> Problem/Diagnosis archetype to see how direct and reference model items align. The idea is then to publish and maintain these on both sites.  Work on the joint FHIR/openEHR Allergy archetype is almost complete. 

June / July

Modelling – specifications refresh - Some issues arose around representation of missing information on CKM reviews - Koray was involved in discussions at Reference Model level and requirements for some level of generic support (e.g. for safe querying) with exact clinical/modelling requirements needing to be worked out. 

October

ADL 2.0 issues- an online meeting is to be arranged with anyone who has an interest / difficulties with this release.  It is hoped to organise a web event early in 2016. 

December

1.03 Specification Release - The Specification Program Group has worked extremely hard on the 1.03 Release which will have been published as this Newsletter goes out. 

Looking Ahead to 2016

Industry Partners Teleconference

Teleconference to get Industry Partners communications underway, to get additional people more engaged and understand the values and how to communicate with them. From a procurement side; what people see is a whole lot of separate things claiming that they can work together.

openEHR /NHSE event

Next year see plans to work with NHS England to establish a set of openEHR training sessions  and to setting up a supplier oriented day, to include partners who may be interested in working on an open platform. openEHR will form part of this day and will look to try build an ‘open community’ with companies that are prepared to work together, providing different skills. 

Licences, IP, Trademarks etc

Ian is progressing things like this and it is planned to look at getting something on the website under ‘intellectual property’. The Board are looking at moving away from CC-BY-ND to possibly CC-BY-SA for specifications and widening licences for software to include AGPL. 

MIE 2016

Medical Informatics Europe MIE 2016 is now part of HEC 2016, and it is planned to have a significant openEHR presence at this event, being held in Munich next August. 

Members

Members have increased during this year, but we still need as many people as possible to join and get involved in the openEHR Foundation, so if you are not already a member, please consider membership.  Go to http://members.openehr.org. 

 And finally...

Thank you to everyone who has supported and been involved with openEHR - wishing all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year