Dear Colleagues,

This email is jointly sent by the openEHR Clinical Knowledge Administrators, 
Silje and Heather.

Following recent email threads, we would like to establish some common 
understanding and expectations about the current clinical modelling effort and 
effect that we hope might stimulate a constructive and innovative conversation 
within the openEHR community about moving the clinical modelling work forward.

Let's say that publication of a typical archetype takes four review rounds. 
Each review round runs for 2 weeks. If we had dedicated Editors who can turn 
those archetype reviews around immediately then we can take a draft archetype 
and publish it 8 weeks later. The reality is that there will be some lag times 
so the reality might be closer to 10 or 12 weeks, but we're not talking 6 
months or years.

Let's also say that the typical Editorial time for each review round is 3 hours 
- an hour for an Editor to do the editing and one hour each for two Editors to 
facilitate the comments. So let's add in one hour preparing an archetype for a 
review round and we have a total of 13 hours editorial time per archetype. 
Simpler archetypes and well-known scales or scores can be published in one or 
two review rounds. More complex ones like the adverse reaction archetype has 
taken tens of hours, possibly closer to a hundred, but worth the effort to get 
it right because of its importance in clinical safety. However we're not 
talking unsustainable hours per archetype to get the majority published.

Within the typical standards environment where review of information models are 
done en masse in 3, 6 or 12 month cycles, our agile and dynamic approach to 
archetype review and publication is outrageously fast and requires only a 
modest budget. And the priorities can be driven by the implementer community.


We really need a different conversation happening about the archetype 
development process, one that recognises the efficient and value for money that 
we have put in place but is largely untapped, rather than complaining that the 
work to date is not complete enough, not focused on the right topics, not 
<insert whatever you like here> enough.

The practical reality is that by far the majority of the Editorial work is not 
resourced, so there is a limited strategic plan apart from the Archetype 
'Sprint'. Rather that the work is largely opportunistic:

  *   dependent on archetypes that are volunteered as a result of real life 
implementations;
  *   translations by those reusing archetypes in different geographical 
contexts; and
  *   reviews occurring when people ask and then volunteer to participate in 
the process.

The Norwegian Nasjonal IKT work is a perfect example of this - so many of the 
archetypes published in the international CKM in the past couple of years are 
the direct result of the Norwegian priorities for content, driven and 
facilitated by the Norwegian Editors but with enormous value contributed by 
international input. Nasjonal IKT have effectively funded the majority of this 
work to support their national program, gaining the enormous benefit of 
international collaboration and input, and in return making available high 
quality archetypes for the rest of the international openEHR, and broader, 
community. They recognise this as a win-win situation.

The source of most of the limited funding that has recently been made available 
for editorial work in the international CKM is Norway's Nasjonal IKT membership 
fees, which have been deliberately directed toward the international clinical 
modelling effort on request from Nasjonal IKT. A few hours a week of dedicated 
editorial time has already increased the international CKM activity manyfold in 
recent months. This includes timely responsiveness to community requests and 
contributions, for the very first time. It would be exciting to see this grow 
and expand through member organisations joining and specifically allocating 
some of their fees towards the clinical modelling effort.

With only modest, strategic resourcing, the collective benefit will be orders 
of magnitude larger than any single organisation can achieve by itself. The 
impact of this can extend way beyond the openEHR international community but to 
other standards organisations and digital health in the broadest sense.

Kind regards

Silje Ljosland Bakke and Heather Leslie
Clinical Knowledge Administrators for the openEHR CKM

Dr Heather Leslie
MB BS, FRACGP, FACHI, GAICD
M +61 418 966 670
Skype: heatherleslie
Twitter: @atomicainfo, @clinicalmodels & @omowizard
www.atomicainformatics.com
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