openEHR Foundation News

Thomas Beale, Chair of the openEHR ARB posts an openEHR status review and progress outlook for 2005 to the openEHR mailing lists.

Dear all,

Best wishes for the new year. The fact that I am saying this near the end of January is proof of how busy we are!

There will be many announcements in the next few weeks. This year will be an exciting one for the openEHR community. Some things to look forward to:

• release 1.0 of the specifications will be out within weeks. Most outstanding 1.0 CRs have been approved by the ARB and have been done. This includes many changes including from implementation sites. You will be able to see all the changes in the change requests online, and in the document revision histories.
• continuing participation and cooperation with standards bodies including CEN TC/251 (particularly the EN13606 EHR communication standard), Standards Australia, and HL7.
• Change Requests and Problem Reports online very soon- proper build servers and web access points for binaries
• implementation of openEHR in Java is underway- access to the openEHR development framework for developers
• ability to create new projects, use openEHR BitKeeper version management, CRs, etc
• a new discussion list for implementors
• big things for archetype & template development
• publication of conformance criteria and test cases
• and many more

The discussions we see on the lists are as ever interesting, pertinent, and perhaps unlike some other discussion lists, used to directly inform specifications and software that the community will use.

The openEHR Foundation remains dedicated to:

• being driven by requirements from the domain, particularly practicing clinicians and patients.
• specifications that compile, not just print.
• evolution through implementation, not just explanation
• being the test bed for health IT standards. If it doesn't work, we'll find out!
• open and free availability of its specifications and source code.
• its community.

Thanks to all of you for perservering so far; I believe that you will start to see very soon that all the thinking, discussions and documents are leading to real systems and better clinical medicine.

As Marx said, "The philosophers have only /interpreted/ the world in different ways; the point is to /change/ it.

"best wishes for 2005

• thomas beale

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