The openEHR standard is on the agenda in the healthcare IT world. Advisory organisations and regional cooperation bodies are enthusiastic - in the Netherlands, promising pilots are popping up here and there, and awareness around the need for a standard for storing healthcare data is growing. Yet usage among software vendors within the Netherlands lags behind. It obviously takes time and resources for vendors to make the switch to openEHR - so why would they want to? There are several advantages.
Invest in speed
One of the major advantages of using openEHR is that the standard consists of two ‘layers’. There is a technical layer and a medical information model. Since these are not intertwined, they can easily be developed separately. This makes the all-over development process much faster.
This division between the two layers also makes openEHR attractive for startups - especially in healthcare, there are numerous regulations and standards you have to comply with as a vendor. If, as a vendor, you connect to an existing, accredited openEHR platform, you save yourself a lot of headaches and can enter the market a lot faster and in a responsible way.
Besides: the more vendors embrace openEHR, the easier it becomes to integrate systems in a way that serves end-users within healthcare organisations and regions and facilitates interoperability and data availability.
Do what you do best
Ultimately, as a vendor, you are most likely an expert on software development - not on healthcare. With openEHR, you have access to the medical knowledge of numerous international healthcare professionals, who have been collaborating on the development of the medical information model for years. There are literally hundreds of pre-built healthcare data models, developed with knowledge of what a healthcare professional needs.
This allows you as a vendor to focus on where your strengths lie.
The world is changing
Besides the aforementioned advantages openEHR has to offer vendors, the fact remains that our world is changing. Developments in policy and legislation (think, at an international level, of the EHDS and in the Netherlands of the Integral Care Agreement) also increasingly focus on data availability. For instance, the EHDS talks about secondary use of healthcare data for scientific research, innovation and policy-making and about making citizens' own healthcare data accessible to them.
In view of these developments at the policy and legislative level, you see many healthcare organisations and regions taking matters into their own hands. Pilots are being launched across the Netherlands and proprietary data platforms are being set up, which may or may not be based on openEHR.
So as a vendor, you simply cannot be left behind - developments will catch up with you if you do not take a position with an eye on where the market is moving.
Starting with openEHR
If you, as a vendor, are interested in getting started with openEHR, we would love to have a chat with you. At CODE24, we have been working with openEHR since we were founded and we are happy to share our experiences and knowledge in that area - after all, it is our vision that this is where the future of healthcare IT lies and we are happy to help other organisations on their way to making it happen. We can also explore together whether joining our open platform for healthcare data (entirely based on openEHR) is an option so that you can make progress quickly.