Dear Gunnar, Thank you for your very thoughtful and helpful commentary - and to everyone contributing to the spirited discussion of the last few days.
There is a very active focus on the future governance of the Foundation, in both the new Management Board and the Board of Governors, which I now chair. The openEHR community is very much alive and continues to evolve rapidly. No-one who experienced its impact at Medinfo 2015 could possibly doubt that - openEHR related papers, posters, tutorials and workshops were the much remarked dominant theme of the conference. The scale of ambition and accomplishment in evidence, from all over the world, including among teams who came to openEHR and applied and implemented it, in one case at the scale of a 2500 bed hospital in China, solely using the resources we freely provide from the web site, was breath-taking. Our governance will continue to evolve. Its founding principles and the sheer hard work and dogged intent, including of huge numbers of volunteers, that have defined and guided it thus far on an often very difficult and rocky pathway, have stood the considerable test of those times. The Articles of the not-for-profit Company underpinning it, and the IP it protects, are fundamental and protective of that mission. Situations change and we all have to adapt. We now have a more mature world of licensing for artefacts like those provided by openEHR. We now recognise it as a methodology, as much as a standard, and thus requiring of an underpinning taught and multiprofessional discipline with a strong focus on practical sustainability and renewal. We now know experimentally how important it is that that methodology and discipline be requirements driven, openly and freely accessible, and capable of localisation and evolution in contexts of medical knowledge, health care services, technical infrastructures and industry. The openEHR mission remains a grand challenge of academia, health services and enterprise and, as with all such wicked problems, is not fixable in any absolute sense or within any specific power base. At UCL, there was and indeed still is great pleasure in seeing the openEHR Foundation mission, that it undoubtedly enabled and nurtured in its childhood, making progress in the world. But that is the pleasure of a proud parent viewing offspring rather than as a boss or owner of any kind. And it is worth noting that the only party in the world specifically excluded, by the Articles of the openEHR not-for-profit Company, from benefiting financially from the openEHR IP is the legal member guaranteeing the not-for-profit company, which is UCL! So I agree with you that the openEHR Foundation certainly was and is an anomaly, but probably a quite important one, nonetheless, albeit that we recognise that it needs to, and will, evolve into some more mainstream form as it progresses. I will hugely welcome your help and support in charting that process and will write separately about that. We have already, as you know, spent a great deal of time and resource seeking to enable and facilitate openEHR methodology to cross-fertilise and integrate with CEN/ISO standards and IHTSDO, and more recently with CIMI and OMG. In closing, please bear with me, one moment, as I reflect that none of this discussion would be taking place had not my successive Provosts of UCL (including the most recent one who now chairs NHS England and it's £115billion per annum budget ) trusted and enabled me to pursue the openEHR mission as part of the academic mission of CHIME. None of it would be taking place had not Sam and Thomas gone on from their time with Dipak and me at Bart's and UCL, to put their lives into creating Ocean Informatics. And I think, neither would it have survived had Dipak and David Lloyd not taken the work on into the domain of CEN and ISO and built crucial and enduring bridges and leadership roles there. Best wishes, David Ingram Emeritus Professor of Health Informatics at UCL President and Chairman of the Board of Governors of the openEHR Foundation Trustee of the OpenEyes Foundation Charity -----Original Message----- From: openEHR-technical [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gunnar Klein Sent: 04 September 2015 08:31 To: [email protected] Subject: openEHR is open but ISO may offer some other advatages Dear friends, I do not think a semantic discussion on the origin and meanings of the word proprietary is helpful. To me, also an advocate of formal standards in CEN and ISO, it is clear that we should regard openEHR artefacts as non-proprietary in line with other communitites in the world of open standards and open source sharing. I am amazed that some people have questioned this. The main reasons are two-fold: a) The specs are openly available free of charge to read and to use and b) The organisation that develops and maintains them (The OpenEHR foundation) is open for anybody with a very low modest membership fee and in addition we have always taken onboard sound technical change requests even from people that are not voting members. However, the formal standards bodies with its often special status in national legislation (and in international agrrements like the European Union and World Trade Agreement have an advantage in some respects to informal bodies like openEHR. Firstly, ISO is important as a federation of national standards bodies, legislation e.g. on public procurement usually refer primarily to formal national standards, that in many cases are just endorsements of ISO standards. I believe that many people in the information systems world are underestimating the status and value of ISO (and IEC) standards because there are so many examples of new informal consortias or open organisations that are formed that play important roles. However, for products like EHR systems that are becoming more and more regulated by medical device legislation in the world and where interoperability becomes a very important characteristic, I think a status as a formal ISO stadnard would be beneficial for openEHR at some point. Having said this I am by no means suggesting to close openEHR as an organisation for development and sharing of artefacts but I think we should carefully consider to submit some of the specifications for endoresements as ISO standards in much the same way as DICOM or HL7 or IEEE have done. The IPR issues are complicated but does not have to mean that there is not an ownership that remains by the openEHR foundation. However, I think it would benefit the strength of our case if a certain version of the AOM is available as a national/ISO standard with an independent life of the rather small organisation with the obscure link to UCL. Irrespective of this, I argued a year ago for the foundation to take steps towards becoming a true international non profit foundation breaking its ties witht the UCL as a founder. It is an anomaly in today's world. Kind regards Gunnar ----------------------------------------------- Gunnar O Klein, professor of eHealth Örebro University, Sweden _______________________________________________ openEHR-technical mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org _______________________________________________ openEHR-technical mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org
