Clinical Program Structure

Owned by Thomas Beale
Last updated: 14-Nov-2022

The Program structure is described in the CPB Terms of Reference (ToR). It is illustrated here, including a possible structure of working groups.

The essential concepts are:

  • official membership is of the Clinical Program Board (CPB), with voting rights and responsibilities, and the Clinical Program Experts Panel (CPXP), which has the same rights of access and participation but no responsibility for voting or accountability. I.e. the CPB manages, and the CPXP provides a larger team of part-time experts;

  • most work is done within working groups (WGs). It is up to the CPB to determine what WGs to create and when;

  • it is proposed that some WGs are created to cover specific domain areas and to act as the editorial group for clinical models of those areas within CKM and other model repositories under the purview of the Clinical Program;

  • most likely a specific WG will be dedicated to overall editor and auditing function of CKM models, which coordinates with other modelling WGs to ensure they all produce coherent models.

Clinical Program Board / CKM relationship

Historically, work has been focussed on archetypes and managed in CKM. Both the archetypes and CKM remain world-best efforts in their category. There is no organisation, including in the US that has a tool like CKM.

The new Clinical Program and its Board will have a significantly expanded remit, to manage not just the core modelling activity, but the many things mentioned under Scope above.

Nevertheless, clinical model development is likely to remain the central activity. CKM currently has 400-500 active known users, and nearly 3,000 user accounts. This is large enough to need its own managers, i.e. Editors, Clinical Knowledge Admins etc. Working Groups (WGs) could be an organisational way to solve this.

The crucial challenge to solve in terms of the clinical modelling activity is scaling - similar to Linux software development - any number of workers can be accommodated with the right on-boarding, project management and integration approach.

The CKM community can be understood as an open source community, i.e. where the key functions (any kind of changes, releasing etc) are managed by an official ‘owner’ - in this case, the openEHR Clinical Program - but where anyone may contribute from the outside. Management of changes to CKM will probably be via dedicated Work Groups supplying members who act as editors and quality controllers. At least one Work Group is likely to be dedicated to Quality assurance, and therefore covering model consistency, correct versioning, determining change impacts and so on.