Hi Gustavo and the openEHR community, I?m really sad and disappointed if Gustavo?s opinion is mirrored elsewhere in the openEHR community.
I?m sure it reflects a frustration with the slow process over past years. But anyone who has bothered to ask me about how I feel about the progress will hear that I am much more frustrated than any of you. We, as the openEHR community really need to do a bit of soul searching. From my point of view we?ve all been very passive about this modelling work, all waiting for someone else to do it or take responsibility for it. The reality is that when Ocean first launched the openEHR CKM, the work fell to Ocean people. Either Ocean funded it OR Ian and I did the editorial work in our own time? no other option, and has been the way for years. Truth is, after a couple of years and getting a couple of hundred archetypes publicly available on CKM, I was really burned out and unwell. No-one seemed to notice the effort, to be honest. Certainly no-one seemed to appreciate it. I stopped doing the work in my own time and reclaimed my evenings and weekends. I hoped that there would be a cry of outrage from the community ? ?Why has the CKM work stopped?? But no one noticed; no one said anything, for at least 18 months, possibly more. This passivity has astounded me. Over 2 years ago, there was a bit of an epiphany ? a special strategic board meeting was held in London where others were invited, including myself. The attendees all agreed that one of the highest priorities was to get archetypes published. I was able to present calculations on how much it would cost to fund some editorial work to get this happening. Nothing happened. Finally, in the second half of last year, the Industry Group has been able to offer the first funded work to Ian and myself to try to fast track some archetypes through to publication. This is the first funding that has been raised in the openEHR community for this critical modelling work ever. The scope is clearly limited to publishing 69 archetypes. Unfortunately there was no extra allocated for the extra time required to train or mentor others to do the work. The Industry Sprint hasn?t been as fast or as focussed as either Ian or I would like as we both have ?day jobs? that require our attention as well. However you will have seen a flurry of activity in the past couple of weeks ? 9 archetypes have been refined and sent out for review in the past 10 days. I really appreciate that the Industry Group has collaborated and committed to this support. And of course it is really exciting that this is one of the first times we will see potential competitive vendors working together to get clinical content standardised ? breaking down the siloes! So the situation IS changing? And in addition, we need to recognise what we do have ? an amazing set of building blocks and an approach to clinician engagement that has not been emulated in any other domain or standards work. This current openEHR approach is world-leading and with fairly modest resources we can do a lot more that needs to be done. The community has a fantastic problem. As of today we have 1300 users from 85 countries registered on the openEHR CKM. What a spectacular resource we have at our finger tips; 381 people have specifically volunteered to review and 199 to translate archetypes ? all through word of mouth, no advertising. We have a purpose-built tool has been developed and provided free of charge to the community for over 7 years in order to manage the library, collaboration and governance of information models use that. We have only two trained Editors and a handful of others with limited experience and zero resources committed to managing it. So far it has been run on the ?smell of an oily rag? ? not sure how that will translate outside of Australia ? and this needs to change to become sustainable.
