Specification Program Board

Since joining Marand, Bostjan has been involved as lead developer in the design, development and implementation of Think!EHR Platform as health data platform based on openEHR standards designed for real-time, transactional health data storage, query, retrieve and exchange. He leads a team of developers that deliver high quality, cost effective solutions with the focus of adding value for developers, participants and other end users by making the most of new and established technologies.

Rong Chen, MD PhD, is the Chief Medical Informatics Officer and the head of Medical Informatics Group at Cambio Healthcare Systems, Sweden, where he is responsible for the research and development in clinical decision support and knowledge management.

Rong holds a PhD degree in health informatics on the subject of EHR semantic interoperability from Linköping University, Sweden. He is an associated researcher at the Health Informatics Centre at Karolinska Institutet, where he lectures and supervises PhD and master students.

Rong has contributed to several core openEHR design specifications, and has for many years led the Java Reference Implementation of openEHR. Rong is the lead author of Guideline Definition Language (GDL), which is designed to express clinical logic for scalable decision support with openEHR underpinning.

Since May 2023 he is also a co-chair on the Specifications Editorial Committee (SEC).

In his early professional years, Sebastian developed complex web-based applications for the healthcare sector in Romania and later on in The Netherlands. His main interests were data interoperability, telemedicine and knowledge-based systems. After receiving an Engineering degree in Automation and Computer Science, Sebastian focused on developing a completely new PHP-based implementation of openEHR specifications. In 2010, he became one of the three founders of Code24 BV, and has since been the lead software engineer within this company. Currently, Code24 BV provides openEHR based IT solutions (Base24, mConsole) for more than 100,000 patients and their care providers in the mental healthcare sector in The Netherlands.

Since May 2020 he is also a co-chair on the Specifications Editorial Committee (SEC).

Birger Haarbrandt holds a B.A. in Medical Information Management and an M.Sc. in Computer Science. Between 2013 and 2017, Birger has established the Hannover Medical School Translational Research Framework (HaMSTR), investigating the enhancement of traditional data warehousing approaches (including i2b2/tranSMART) with openEHR. He previously worked on the establishment of a regional health network in the state of Lower-Saxony based on IHE XDS and as a software developer for CGM MEDISTAR.

Since 2015, he has substantially contributed to the concept of the HiGHmed consortium to apply for the Medical Informatics Initiative, a national research project to enable secondary use of health data across institutions. Since the start of the project in January 2018, he is working in HiGHmed as a software architect for the Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics, aiming at the establishment of an open platform based on IHE, openEHR and FHIR between eight German university hospitals.

Bjørn has implemented openEHR systems since 2010 and has been a member of the specification editorial committee since 2015. Bjorn believes in an open platform approach and that the openEHR community is the best approach to make a global approach to better health data, which is needed to be able to provide better healthcare services and for the research for new treatments.

He received his M. Sc. in Telecommunications from the Norwegian university of science and technology, NTNU. Before this he worked some years as a physiotherapist. He has been working in e-health in various areas, starting as a developer of a national booking solution for medical services in Norway. Later he worked on integration and interop between systems and organizations. More recently he has focused on implementation of openEHR in DIPS Arena, the next generation of the DIPS EHR solution. His contributions to this work has included both openEHR evangelism and on the specification and implementation of the DIPS openEHR server.

Diego Boscá received his M. Sc. in Computer Science from Universitat Politècnica de Valencia (UPV) and is currently a predoctoral research fellow at the Biomedical Informatics Group (IBIME) at the ITACA Institute of UPV. He has been involved in the implementation and deployment of health information systems and use of health standards in the real world for over eight years.

His experience covers the analysis, design, implementation and deployment of semantically interoperable health information systems using standards such as openEHR, ISO 13606, HL7 CDA. He is a certified HL7 CDA Specialist. He has participated as external advisor at the European epSOS project and as an external expert in the SemanticHealthNet European project. He has worked in the development and governance of the archetypes for the Spanish national shared EHR project. He has participated in several research projects and co-authored more than 30 papers about data integration and standardization of the EHR. Diego is one of the authors of LinkEHR software for archetype-based data integration.

Erik Sundvall has an MSc in Information Technology, and PhD in Medical informatics from Linköping University, Sweden. Recent activities focus on trying to tie things together via implementation of an openEHR based educational EHR system (LiU EEE) enabling reusable patient overview system at the same time as it is a test platform for a scalable REST based openEHR component/service design that aims to make it easier to deploy openEHR based systems by putting together components from different projects/vendors/platforms. Erik has also supervised several student projects and MSc theses, e.g. one leading to the first openEHR Archetype editor in Java.

Ian is a former Scottish GP, and has been involved in healthcare informatics for nearly 30 years, working with and promoting openEHR technologies for the last 8 years, initially with Ocean Informatics and latterly as an independent consultant.

His current focus is on the promotion of the Apperta open e-health platform ecosystem, with openEHR at its core, and the development of a related Development Platform, adopted by NHS England as a key part of their Code4Health initiative.

A Director of the openEHR Foundation Board. Previous Chair of the openEHR Management Board, and Director of the International Board from March 2019 until November 2022.

After defending a PhD in the field of data mining at University of Ljubljana and briefly working for an insurance company software division, Matija Polajnar joined Better in 2014 (called Marand at that time). Beginning in the team developing Better's end-user products built atop their openEHR platform, in 2017 he was transferred to the openEHR platform development unit as a software architect and developer. Since 2020 he is the technical lead of this team.

Software Developer at Nedap Healthcare

Pablo Pazos Gutierrez has a Computer Engineering degree from UdelaR (University of the Republic), Uruguay. He has worked with health information systems, standards and interoperability since 2006. His first project in eHealth was an EHR based on openEHR, and he is part of the openEHR community since 2006. His interests include software architecture of distributed and integrated systems, information models, clinical data repositories, open platforms and open source. In 2011 Pablo created the first online full length course about openEHR in Spanish, since then he coordinates the openEHR community in Spanish. In 2012 Pablo founded CaboLabs, a company that provides consultancy and training in health information systems, standards and interoperability. Since then he has developed several courses and workshops. Pablo is a member of openEHR SEC heavily involved in openEHR software development, and appointed to the openEHR Education Program Board in 2022, as well as in disseminating the openEHR standard in Latin America, in association with the Chilean Association of Health Informatics (ACHISA).

Sebastian Garde is a Health Informatician, holding a doctorate from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He is also a Foundation Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health. 
Currently serving as Product Lead at Ocean Health Systems, Sebastian is responsible for the Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM). At Ocean, he has built on his research on the governance of clinical content models at CQUniversity Australia, culminating in the creation of the Clinical Knowledge Manager. He has been involved with openEHR since 2004.
Before joining Ocean, Sebastian held various positions in academia. He worked as a Research Fellow in Health Informatics at CQUniversity Australia and as a Research Associate at Austin Health, Melbourne, one of Australia's largest hospitals. Earlier in his career, Sebastian was a scientific employee in the field of Medical Informatics at the Heidelberg University Medical Centre, Germany.

Seref Arikan is a software architect who has been working at Ocean Informatics UK since 2010. He started his professional career in 1997 as a freelance developer working on B2B and B2C solutions and has worked in various health IT companies since 2001, mostly in various R&D and product development roles.

His work on openEHR started around 2002, while he was working for a hospital information system vendor. He has released various openEHR related software components and tools as open source in 2009, which were develop in relation to his PhD in medical informatics. Seref's PhD, which he completed at UCL, CHIME, under the supervision of Professor David Ingram, is on the integration of openEHR specifications with Bayesian Networks for clinical decision support.

He is currently in charge of development of various platform components at Ocean Informatics, with a focus on analytics, scalability and API development. His particular interest and most active research is on the implementation of openEHR persistence and relevant specifications such as AQL.

I'm Severin Kohler, a health informatician shaping industry standards. Currently, I serve as a Member of the Specification Board at openEHR International, where I play a key role in driving advancements in healthcare informatics.

My work involves actively participating in various medical informatics projects, including significant contributions to initiatives like HiGHmed and the NUM project. 

Shinji KOBAYASHI is an associate professor in the EHR research unit, Kyoto University. He has worked as a clinical hematology/oncologist and researched clinical informatics. He launched openEHR.jp and leads openEHR localisation in Japan as well as the Ruby implementation of openEHR. This localisation work is now propagating to Asia.

Thomas is one of the founders of openEHR International and is the chief technical architect and editor of the openEHR specifications, and was the co-chair on the Specifications Editorial Committee (SEC) up to 2023. He is also a openEHR CIC Board member.

He has participated in international standards work (OMG HDTF, HL7, CEN TC/251) for many years. He designed the archetype formalism (ADL), object model (AOM) (an ISO standard), the Basic Meta-Model (BMM), and much of the Task Planning and Decision Language specifications.

He has consulted for Intermountain Healthcare, the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and various ministries, departments of health and other public agencies in places including Australia, UK, Brazil, Jamaica, Denmark, Sweden, and Catalonia.

Thomas's academic background is in Electrical Engineering (communications) and Computer Science. His earlier professional work was in real-time distributed control (SCADA) systems for power, gas and mining; investment management and finance, and document and software configuration management systems.

He has published a number of papers in health informatics and has presented widely on the patient-centric EHR, the model-based platform eco-system, and e-Health strategy.

Thomas is VP Informatics at GraphiteHealth.

I'm a developer at heart, working in the health tech sector for almost a decade, building proprietary solutions. 

Working from Romania, I joined the EHRbase project in 2022 as the Product Owner. In my role, I am supporting the team in enhancing EHRbase's capabilities across both open-source and enterprise domains.

Since May 2023 I'm also part of the SEC Expert Panel.

I'm dedicated to shaping a more open, accessible future for health data, driven by my belief in the transformative power of open standards in healthcare.

Borut Jures spent many years as a software architect and implementer of ERP systems before “accidentally” finding openEHR. Since then he has implemented openEHR code generators, ADL converter, OPT data synthesizer and FHIR-openEHR data mapping tool. For some time, he researched the use of BPMN for clinical pathways.

His first openEHR tool was generating UML diagrams from openEHR specifications. More recently he has focused on SNOMED CT as a basis for semantic interoperability of clinical data repositories.

Christian Chevalley is R&D maager at ADOC Software Development. He has over 30 years of experience in software design, development, data center architecture and IT security. He has led several developments of multimillion dollar commercial projects in the international finance, manufacturing, Telco and health care industries. He is specialized in building distributed networked systems on UNIX/Linux and mainframes, integrating a large spectrum of IT resources including micro-controllers, databases, real-time unified communications, location systems, identity management and private data protection.

For the past twelve years, Christian has been focusing on producing systems for the Healthcare arena; point of care management for aged care and acute care, telemedicine and careflow. He has been developing the EtherCIS platform based on openEHR since 2010 and has delivered a first release, which includes an open source openEHR server.

Christian studied Computer Science and Physics at Geneva University and speaks fluent English and French.

Chunlan is a gynaecologist and obstetrician who has been developing openEHR based software APIs and applications for more than 15 years. Her personal interest area is openEHR data reporting. She was the lead author of the openEHR AQL specification, and has worked in many other areas:

• openEHR RM implementation in C#
• openEHR RM Schema
• openEHR template to OPT transform
• HL7 message to openEHR composition transform
• openEHR Platform, including EHR APIs, Demographic APIs, AQL query engine etc.
• openEHR data reporting

Her PhD (U South Australia) was in Computer-based Patient Education, knowledge engineering in patient profile.

A doctor by training, but a developer at heart. Founded Medblocks in 2015, and currently serving customers all around the world to deliver better healthcare. Believes that providing data-driven clinical decisions can save more lives than doctors can, by themselves. Medblocks provides an open-source library for building openEHR interfaces - Medblocks UI. Also providing opinionated open-source backend services for building your openEHR + FHIR-based applications quickly - Medblocks Stack.

Providing consulting services for:
1. Setting up openEHR server - Cloud/on-premise
2. openEHR Clinical Modelling and Template Designing
3. Building openEHR based applications and forms from openEHR templates
4. Integrating and helping with Medblocks UI into your existing frontend application
5. Dashboards and analytics using AQL on openEHR repositories
6. Setting up SNOMED CT server - Cloud/on-premise
7. SNOMED CT mapping and Reference set creation
8. Setting up an FHIR server - Cloud/on-premise
9. Building and deploying SMART on FHIR applications
10. FHIR Profiling and clinical modelling

Heath is a Health Information and Systems Integration Consultant with 20 years’ experience in solution architecture, development and integration of health information systems. My interest is in shared health records, electronic transfer of care and health information exchange. I specialise in the architecture and integration of digital health solutions using openEHR data repositories, clinical archetypes, HL7 messaging and FHIR APIs.

Jake is a software developer on the HighMed project.

I trained as a medical doctor at the University of Groningen Netherlands and have clinical experience in (neuro) surgery and elderly care. I currently work at Nedap as a clinical informatician focused on elderly care. I’ve been seeing patients on and off for the last view years, and intend to keep my focus on IT and keep practicing to keep my license and experience up to date, to keep providing clinical input that is recent enough to be of value.

My goal is to support doctors in their difficult job with excellent EHR software. My interests are in information modelling, multidisciplinary collaboration, interoperability and the clinician experience with our software/company.

Product owner, DIPS asa, Norway.

Luis Marco-Ruiz, PhD, is a data engineer at HIGHmed Consortium, who focuses his work on the adoption of information standards and terminologies for clinical data reuse and clinical decision support. He holds a MSc in Applied Statistics and a PhD in Health Science.

Since 2007 Dr. Marco-Ruiz has participated as a developer, advisor, and researcher in private- and public-funded projects in Norway, Germany, the UK, and Spain. In 2013 he joined the Norwegian Centre for E-health Research where he works in the development of national data reuse infrastructures and advises the Norwegian health authorities on the adoption of clinical information standards and biomedical ontologies. In addition, he works as a semantic interoperability specialist at the Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics (Hannover Medical School) developing a cross-institutional data reuse network for the HiGHmed consortium, which involves the Hannover Medical School, Heidelberg University Hospital, and University Medical Center Göttingen, among others.

Luis is a member of openEHR SEC Expert Panel and Education Program Board.

Pieter has an MSc in computer science at the University of Twente (2007).

He started working at Nedap Healthcare in 2007. During this time, He led the development from the small time registration application to a fully featured suite for use in the elderly care, including an EHR implementation with medical and administrative records and financial/invoicing features. After a short break working on smart grid systems involving home battery systems for Nedap Energy Systems, He returned to the Healthcare group, becoming responsible for the teams that develop and maintain the administrative and financial parts of the Nedap EHR. He presently remains in that position.

In 2015 he introduced openEHR at Nedap Healthcare. After building a prototype we concluded openEHR was the way forward for Nedap, solving the need for a much more flexible and standards based EHR solution. As Nedap started implementing a CDR, it found that ADL 2 had clear advantages over the currently used version, but tooling was lacking. Nedap decided to build its own tooling, which we then released as the open source library Archie. Archie is now a library upon which archetype authoring tools, CDRs and client applications can be built, with an international community of users and contributors. Pieter is the primary maintainer of this library. He also led the development of an ADL 2 Archetype Editor based on Archie.

Within Nedap Healthcare Pieter also helped to build a CDR plus a number of client applications, and to integrate it into our suite of products. It is now an actively used part of our software suite for clients, with a generic application that works on all archetypes and data, plus specific custom made applications for specific purposes. openEHR enabled Nedap to flexibly model EHR data, and build its EHR upon international standards.

Renaud Subiger is a solutions architect with a passion for digital health and interoperability. He has been working on designing and implementing various systems within the Java ecosystem for over 17 years now.

Since 2016, Renaud has been involved in significant healthcare projects such as MyHealth@EU, NUM-CODEX, SiNCP, and has also participated in several IHE Connectathon events. Through these experiences, he has gained an extensive knowledge of standards like FHIR, openEHR, the IHE profiles, and DICOM.

Renaud believes in open standards and platforms. He is a member of the openEHR SEC Expert Panel and contributes to HAPI FHIR and EHRbase projects.

Since joining Marand, Bostjan has been involved as lead developer in the design, development and implementation of Think!EHR Platform as health data platform based on openEHR standards designed for real-time, transactional health data storage, query, retrieve and exchange. He leads a team of developers that deliver high quality, cost effective solutions with the focus of adding value for developers, participants and other end users by making the most of new and established technologies.

Christian Chevalley is R&D maager at ADOC Software Development. He has over 30 years of experience in software design, development, data center architecture and IT security. He has led several developments of multimillion dollar commercial projects in the international finance, manufacturing, Telco and health care industries. He is specialized in building distributed networked systems on UNIX/Linux and mainframes, integrating a large spectrum of IT resources including micro-controllers, databases, real-time unified communications, location systems, identity management and private data protection.

For the past twelve years, Christian has been focusing on producing systems for the Healthcare arena; point of care management for aged care and acute care, telemedicine and careflow. He has been developing the EtherCIS platform based on openEHR since 2010 and has delivered a first release, which includes an open source openEHR server.

Christian studied Computer Science and Physics at Geneva University and speaks fluent English and French.

Heath is a Health Information and Systems Integration Consultant with 20 years’ experience in solution architecture, development and integration of health information systems. My interest is in shared health records, electronic transfer of care and health information exchange. I specialise in the architecture and integration of digital health solutions using openEHR data repositories, clinical archetypes, HL7 messaging and FHIR APIs.

Trained as a medical doctor but an engineer at heart and self-taught full-stack developer, Koray has done his PhD in health informatics on openEHR and is a Foundational Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health (FAIDH). With almost 30 years of experience in digital health as a developer, academic researcher and entrepreneur, he has a strong background in EHR & health information architectures, interoperability with hands on implementation experience on key standards such as HL7 v2, FHIR and SNOMED-CT. Koray's mission is to fix healthcare by enabling patient-centred, personalised, and value-based appropriate care through interoperability and digital health solutions.

Koray has been contributing to standards development and governance at a global scale, religiously to openEHR as a domain expert and former member of the first openEHR Foundation Management Board. Koray is also a founding member of HL7 Turkey and has been on HL7 New Zealand Board since 2011. He is also a member of the ISO TC/251 Taskforce on Telehealth and Virtual Care.

Koray currently serves as Chief Health Informatics Officer (CHIO) and Head of Research at The Clinician, a New Zealand headquartered digital health company he co-founded that offers the ZEDOC Platform and services for patient engagement and managing Patient Generated Health Data (PROMs/PREMs and objective biometric data) to drive value-based care.

He recently founded GALATA-Digital LLC-FZ as his own consultancy business in Dubai and looking to engage with exciting and innovative projects offering services with a focus on openEHR, FHIR and digital twins underpinned by EHR, AI, Genomics and Computational Physiology - all brought together by effective use of industry standards.

Pieter has an MSc in computer science at the University of Twente (2007).

He started working at Nedap Healthcare in 2007. During this time, He led the development from the small time registration application to a fully featured suite for use in the elderly care, including an EHR implementation with medical and administrative records and financial/invoicing features. After a short break working on smart grid systems involving home battery systems for Nedap Energy Systems, He returned to the Healthcare group, becoming responsible for the teams that develop and maintain the administrative and financial parts of the Nedap EHR. He presently remains in that position.

In 2015 he introduced openEHR at Nedap Healthcare. After building a prototype we concluded openEHR was the way forward for Nedap, solving the need for a much more flexible and standards based EHR solution. As Nedap started implementing a CDR, it found that ADL 2 had clear advantages over the currently used version, but tooling was lacking. Nedap decided to build its own tooling, which we then released as the open source library Archie. Archie is now a library upon which archetype authoring tools, CDRs and client applications can be built, with an international community of users and contributors. Pieter is the primary maintainer of this library. He also led the development of an ADL 2 Archetype Editor based on Archie.

Within Nedap Healthcare Pieter also helped to build a CDR plus a number of client applications, and to integrate it into our suite of products. It is now an actively used part of our software suite for clients, with a generic application that works on all archetypes and data, plus specific custom made applications for specific purposes. openEHR enabled Nedap to flexibly model EHR data, and build its EHR upon international standards.