openEHR
A perspective on the openEHR approach and modular software development
By
Rok Knafelj
Due to the current global situation, the openEHR Day Nordics and openEHR Workshop for Social Care, which were scheduled for 25th March in Helsinki, had to be postponed to a later date. In the meantime, the openEHR International is posting blogs written by knowledgeable experts.
The author of the first blog is Hanna Pohjonen PhD who is openEHR Ambassador Finland and a Healthcare Management Consultant from Rosaldo Oy.
She argues that traditional systems are not able to meet changing user needs or easily adjust to new ways of working in healthcare:
“Novel and more flexible approaches are needed. Patient centricity demands capabilities to build cross-organizational patient pathways. We need to be able to utilize data to its full extent across different systems and organizations; viewing data from different sources is not enough. There is a need for clinical decision support, analytics, automation etc. Population level analytics is also a hot topic today, but to enable analytics the data needs to be harmonized on the semantic level. There is also a desire to acquire different parts of the system from different vendors, since no vendor can be an expert in all areas.”
In her blog, Hanna Pohjonen PhD explains the differences between the traditional monolith models with the modular openEHR based electronic health record. She describes several benefits of the open approach such as semantic interoperability, ability to deploy new innovative functionalities creating opportunities for system providers, and modelling and management of cross-organizational patient pathways. Furthermore, EHR functionalities can be built step-by-step, module-by-module utilizing the data repository and common technical services.
You are invited to read full blog here.