Specification Program Board

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.

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.

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.

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 Marand in 2014. Beginning in the team developing Marand's end-user products built atop their openEHR platform Think!EHR, in 2017 he was transferred to the openEHR platform development unit as a software architect and developer. Lately his main focus is on Marand's effort of implementing the openEHR's Task Planning Model.

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.

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.

Sebastian Garde is a Health Informatician with a doctoral degree from the University of Heidelberg, Germany and Foundation Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Digital Health.  As Product Lead and Health Informatics Consultant at Ocean Health Systems, Sebastian is responsible for the Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM) and is involved in openEHR and its application in various ways. Prior to his involvement with Ocean, Sebastian was a Research Fellow and Postdoctoral Research Fellow for Health Informatics at Central Queensland University, Australia from 2004-2007 and a Research Associate at Austin Health, Melbourne, one of Australia's largest hospitals. From 2001-2004 he was a scientific employee at the Department of Medical Informatics of the Heidelberg University Medical Centre in 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.

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.

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 Frankel is a health informatics Consultant with 18 years experience in design and development of clinical information systems with an emphasis on shared health records, system interoperability and electronic referrals. In the past, Heath has specialised in Health Level 7 (HL7) clinical messaging and its relationship to Electronic Health Records (EHRs).

Heath joined Ocean Health Systems in 2004 as head of software development. He has designed and overseen the development of Ocean's openEHR clinical modelling tools and EHR application software components and contibutes to the openEHR specification development.

Specialties:archetype-based and openEHR application development and integration, HL7 messaging, UML, Software Architecture

Jake is a software developer on the HighMed project.

Luis Marco-Ruiz, PhD, is a data engineer 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.

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 Frankel is a health informatics Consultant with 18 years experience in design and development of clinical information systems with an emphasis on shared health records, system interoperability and electronic referrals. In the past, Heath has specialised in Health Level 7 (HL7) clinical messaging and its relationship to Electronic Health Records (EHRs).

Heath joined Ocean Health Systems in 2004 as head of software development. He has designed and overseen the development of Ocean's openEHR clinical modelling tools and EHR application software components and contibutes to the openEHR specification development.

Specialties:archetype-based and openEHR application development and integration, HL7 messaging, UML, Software Architecture

Koray is a medical doctor with PhD in Information Systems and a fellow of the Australasian College of Health Informatics. Having developed a number of successful clinical applications in the past (e.g. PATHOS-WEB for reporting and analysis in anatomical pathology) his goal is to bring together health and other related data in a consistent and computable manner so as to open up the way for new biomedical breakthroughs.

Based at the University of Auckland (joint appointment with Auckland Bioengineering Institute and the National Institute for Health Innovation), his research interests include clinical information modelling, EHR standards and software maintainability, and teaches healthcare decision support systems. Koray is vice-chair of HL7 New Zealand, leads the openEHR Localisation Program and sits in the Health Information Standards Organisation (HISO) and a member of the Sector Architects Group. Koray has co-authored the New Zealand Interoperability Reference Architecture and led technical evaluations of major health IT innovation projects. He also advises the government and industry.