Management Board

Sam Heard is a practicing clinician who has worked throughout his career in inner London (UK) and the Northern Territory (Australia) to assist the standardisation of health information to empower clinicians and their patients to improve health care and outcomes.

This work began with the Good European Health Record in the early 90s, continued through a long collaboration with Thomas Beale and CHIME at UCL, the establishment of Ocean Informatics as a commercial vehicle to assist in the vision and culminating in setting up the openEHR Foundation in London in 2002.

The work has continued as a Director of the openEHR Foundation, and CEO until 2012 and current board Chair of Ocean Health Systems. Sam was a foundation co-Chair of the HL7 EHR Technical Committee and has worked extensively with the UK and Australian national programs to utilise and refine the openEHR method.

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.

Tomaž is the CEO of Better and an experienced leader of a large group of developers building world-class software products for more than 30 years. He is always challenging his team to build better software using state-of-the-art technology, architectures and processes. He has a deep understanding of software platforms, architecture, deployment and business models.

Tomaž has a proven track record delivering innovative turn-key solutions for large clients in telecommunications, finance and healthcare. He has been speaker at conferences including TeleManagement Forum, HIMSS and Health 2.0.

Xudong is professor of medical informatics in Zhejiang University of China. His research focuses are EHR, CDSS and big data analytics. He has been working in the area of healthcare informatics for over 20 years and led several major Chinese national projects including “High-end EMR Technologies and System Development”. He is also a visiting guest professor at the Technical University of Eindhoven, where he co-supervised several PhD students on clinical pathway analytics and clinical decision support. Currently he serves as General Secretary of the Chinese Medical Software Association which has large influence on health IT domain in China.

Silje is an informatician and a registered nurse, and has a clinical background in plastic, reconstructive and hand surgery as well as clinical research from the University Hospital of Northern Norway. She has worked in health IT for more than five years, first in the Bergen Hospital Trust and she’s now an information architect in the National ICT health trust for strategic IT cooperation in the Norwegian hospital system. She has been a leading figure in Norway’s national archetype governance since the start in 2013.

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.

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.

After participating in the GEHR project in 1994 with Prof David Ingram's team at CHIME, UCL (UK), he worked since 1998 on EHR architectures, and participated in international standards work (OMG HDTF, HL7, CEN TC/251) for many years. He is one of the founders of the openEHR Foundation, and principal editor of the specifications. He designed the archetype formalism (ADL) and object model (AOM), now an ISO standard. He ran the Architecture Review Board 2005 - 2008.

He has published a number of papers in health informatics and has also presented widely on EHRs, e-Health and archetypes.

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.

Joana Feijó holds a degree in Microbiology from the Portuguese Catholic University, a Post-graduation in Basic and Molecular Biology and a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from Abel Salazar Biomedical Sciences Institute from the Oporto University.

Joana works at Critical Software, as a Business Development Manager for the Health area. She is responsible for product conceptualization, development and commercialization. During the last 3 years, she has been focused on an openEHR based product development for managing Clinical information.

Previous to joining Critical Group, Joana worked for ALERT Life Sciences Computing, S.A. as Director of Clinical Content Department and Functional Analysis Department. During her 3 years at ALERT, Joana was responsible for national and international teams regarding software specifications and Clinical Content definition for the clinical applications. She was also responsible for the medical consultant group.

Before ALERT Joana was an Associate Professor lecturing Biochemistry, Biophysics and Microbiology.

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.