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I want to learn about openEHR, where should I start?

There’s a lot of free information about openEHR online – including YouTube tutorials, blog posts, academic papers, and the official openEHR website. Paid courses also exist, but we recommend starting with the free resources, which are usually enough to learn at your own pace. Since openEHR is very community-driven, you can also join the openEHR Discourse forum to ask questions and learn from others. You can also contact us if you have any question.

Here are some links that we recommend to start:

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Does Luxembourg has a Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM)?

No, Luxembourg is too small at the moment to benefit from a regional CKM. There isn’t yet a large enough local community doing modelling work that requires meeting specific local requirements, and there’s little awareness of this kind of need. For now, the best approach is to collaborate directly with the international CKM by taking part in modelling reviews and translating archetypes there. This will likely cover more than 80% of Luxembourg’s projects needs out-of-the-box, from feedback of ongoing projects in the country.

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Can “installing” openEHR in my organization resolve all of our health data problems?’

No. openEHR is not a plug-and-play software that instantly fixes every data challenge. It’s an open specification which is essentially a set of rules and standards for how to store, structure, and exchange clinical data. To use it effectively, you still need:

• An openEHR-compliant server to store and manage the data. There are free and open source solutions (EHRbase) and paid solutions.
• Applications and tools (such as portals, dashboards, modelling tooling or form builders) to let users interact with that data. Some companies provide these tools, some of them with no cost.
• Configuration and customization to fit your organization’s workflows and needs.

Think of openEHR as providing the blueprint for how your clinical data should be organized and managed. You still need to build the rest of the “house” – the servers, the interfaces, the integrations – and adapt them to your specific environment. When used properly, openEHR can greatly improve data quality, interoperability, and reusability, but it’s not a one-step magic solution. Most openEHR users begin by setting up an openEHR server to create a Clinical Data Repository (CDR), ensuring data is collected consistently across projects and building their own tooling or user-interfaces.

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Is it hard to learn?

It depends – but for the most common use case, not really. There’s a myth that openEHR is hard to learn, mainly because its benefits have only recently been widely recognized. Like with any framework, you need to study it before you can work effectively with it. The methodology is different from what many IT professionals are used to. It relies on a multi-level modelling where there is a separation of data definitions (archetypes) and tech implementation. For the modelling of data concepts it requires clinical input from health domain experts to ensure the best possible models. openEHR isn’t suited to the “quick and dirty” approach, which is why most existing models are of high quality.

There are 3 main points to understand:

• Creating and modelling clinical concepts (archetypes) are best suited to those from a clinical background, as they can provide use cases and help refine the fit of clinical concepts. An archetype is a piece of software based on the openEHR reference model, with its own versioning cycle, so some informatics knowledge is helpful to understand the technical side.
• Development on top of clinical models and and using openEHR server (most common use case) – Involves recording and querying data from an openEHR server. If you know how to interact with a REST API, most of what you’ll need to learn is the openEHR reference model so you can understand its data structures and types. Queries use AQL (Archetype Query Language). If you know SQL, AQL will feel familiar, though some SQL functions won’t work in AQL.
• Development on openEHR specifications and tools directly will require deep knowledge of all openEHR areas. This is rare in practice, except for those working on openEHR server implementations or tooling.

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Where can I find an user interface to deal with openEHR?

There’s no built-in UI in openEHR or endorsed by openEHR. openEHR focuses purely on the backend – it provides a open specification (think of it as a detailed instruction manual for building an EHR system). Some companies offer server solutions that follow the openEHR specification – these can be free and open-source or paid. Other companies provide user interfaces built on top of an openEHR server, such as form builders, clinical portals, dashboards, query builders, modelling tools, etc. These interfaces are not controlled by openEHR. They are owned and maintained by the companies that create them, but they must be compliant with the openEHR specification. What is the benefit overall? iIf you decide to switch providers, you won’t lose to the data schema (template), the data itself, neither the queries. Because everything follows the same standard structure, moving to another openEHR-compliant provider can often be as simple as plug-and-play in most cases.

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If openEHR is an open specification for an EHR system, does that mean it can also handle billing or scheduling?

No. There are better, dedicated solutions for those tasks. openEHR is specifically designed to focus on the re-use and management of clinical data – information directly related to a patient’s health. Billing information does not contain intrinsic clinical meaning and, when present, only reflects clinical activity indirectly. As such, it is considered out of scope for openEHR.

A good way to think about it is to imagine an EHR system as a building made of different blocks:

• The openEHR block contains your clinical information.
• Another block might handle scheduling.
• Another could store demographic data.
• Yet another might manage billing.

Each block serves a specific purpose, and together they form a complete EHR system but openEHR’s role is the clinical information block.