openEHR News

Thomas Beale has posted a letter from Prof David Ingram, CHIME department, University College London regarding the plans and activities of the openEHR Foundation expansion. Specifically in this announcement is the fact that Dr. Tony Shannon is to take over the chair of the Clinical Review Board.

Complete letter is below the fold.

from Prof David Ingram, CHIME department, University College London:

I am delighted to announce that Dr Tony Shannon has accepted an invitation, on behalf of the openEHR Foundation Board, to take over the chair of the Clinical Review Board. Tony has long experience and interest in clinical information management, as Clinical Lead for the Clinical Content Service of NHS Connecting for Health and as Consultant in Emergency Medicine at Leeds Teaching Hospitals.

My UCL colleague, Dr Dipak Kalra, has been the founding chair of the CRB but felt it the right time to step down and make way for a new appointment, recognising, as we all do, that openEHR governance needs to spread beyond the founding members at UCL and Ocean Informatics. Dipak, Sam Heard and I remain as the active directors of the Foundation, but this, too, may well change quickly, in the period ahead, as we work to broaden the governance of the Foundation. Ideally, we feel that the Foundation needs to remain agile and inclusive in its work, while consolidating its relationships and accountability to users and international stakeholder organisations, keen to capitalise on its work. In this transition, we must try to avoid exchanging a crucible of innovation for a tanker full of treacle.

Tony Shannon has an honorary appointment as senior research fellow at UCL and has been active clinically in building wider awareness of and engagement with the mission of openEHR, for several years. Along with Tim Cook, a member of the ARB, he has joined Sam, Dipak, Tom Beale and me in crucial new discussions about how to take the Foundation into its next stage of development and governance, as its work grows rapidly in international focus and importance. We have received a number of approaches for new partnerships and we will be taking these very seriously and opening discussions more widely within the international community, including at a session of the WoHIT conference in November, under the auspices of our collaborating partners in EuroRec.

openEHR exists to champion the clinical ownership of the fundamental requirements for effective and useful electronic health records and to support the discipline, engagement and trust required to help them succeed. Central to its approach is shared and collaborative research, development and iterative evaluation, though real world implementations.

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