In Sweden, there has been an interest in openEHR for long time and the interest has recently increased, due to a general higher focus on medical informatics in Sweden. To better make use of the interest and to be open for all stakeholders, there were a need to formalize the openEHR interest into a more organized openEHR collaboration. The collaboration was therefore set up as a working group to Swedish Medical Informatics Association to facilitate from their already ongoing work in medical informatics and to be able to serve as a “neutral ground” for different care givers and information system vendors to do work together.

The first main task the openEHR collaboration carried out was to organize a training series with four half-day lectures. The lectures were mostly performed with lecturers from inside the openEHR collaboration. The lecture series was well received by the participants and the most well-attended lecture had more than a hundred paying participants, which is a lot for a country with a quite small population.

Currently the openEHR collaboration is focusing on setting up their way of working with development and management of openEHR artefacts and in parallel develop their most needed archetypes that are not available elsewhere. The collaboration intends to continue to create needed archetypes that are of international as well as purely national interest, translate international archetypes into Swedish and bind the archetype’s content to SNOMED CT, since SNOMED CT is a central part of the Swedish e-health strategy.

So far, representatives from six of Sweden’s healthcare regions, two major suppliers of healthcare information systems and a government agency are participating in the collaboration. However, there seems to be more interested organizations that potentially will join in the future.

 

Further contact about the subject :

Mikael Nyström

Senior informatiker, tekn. dr, civ.ing.

Board member SFMI