Announcement Concerning Progress with IHTSDO and Future Directions

At its October meeting in Toronto, the General Assembly of the IHTSDO received and discussed a proposal, submitted by its Management Board, to support, develop and maintain the IP in openEHR, within a broader framework of IHTSDO governance for clinical content of the electronic health record.

IHTSDO Decision

The openEHR Foundation Board has now heard from the IHTSDO Management Board, saying that, whilst the objective of the proposal was considered by the GA to be within the scope of the organisation and that it represented a pressing issue for their governments, it was unable to reach consensus that going forward with openEHR in this way is the right choice, at this time.

It confirmed its wish to continue a pathway of harmonisation with openEHR and expressed considerable appreciation for the work done in setting out the proposal, by the working group of Foundation and IHTSDO members. The pathway forward that they have chosen is the creation of an IHTSDO Task Force, to review the requirements for clinical content standardisation, afresh, and then proceed towards an open process for meeting those requirements, in which openEHR would be invited to participate.

This is disappointing from our perspective as we believed that the IHTSDO was a good organisation with which to partner, to provide the broader governance for developing and maintaining the openEHR specifications and related tooling that we have been seeking. We have been encouraged, in successive stages over two years, to actively engage in this dialogue to seek greater harmonisation between eHealth standards bodies. It is a time of financial hardship and the openEHR Foundation did seek a significant injection of funds into the specifications and tooling: this may have been a contributing factor in the decision. It was critical to the Board that this move did involve an injection of capital.