Overview

This page is for discussion of governance issues in openEHR from the point of view of better enabling local openEHR communities.

"Governance"

Governance is the activity of governing. It relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance. It consists either of a separate process or of a specific part of management or leadership processes. Sometimes people set up a government to administer these processes and systems.

In the case of a business or of a non-profit organisation, governance relates to consistent management, cohesive policies, guidance, processes and decision-rights for a given area of responsibility. For example, managing at a corporate level might involve evolving policies on privacy, on internal investment, and on the use of data. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governance]

In short, governance is to give shape to ideas, wills, expectations and hopes, to align objectives, involvement, actions and people.

OpenEHR mission & vision

Mission:
- openEHR is an international not-for-profit Foundation, working towards:
  - Making the interoperable, life-long electronic health record a reality
  - Improving health care in the information society.
- It does this by:
  - Developing open specifications, open-source software and knowledge resources
  - Engaging in clinical implementation projects
  - Participating in international standards development
  - Supporting health informatics education

Vision:
- The openEHR Foundation is proceeding on the basis of three principles: rigour, engagement and trust. They have arisen from consideration of the key aspects of the Foundation's work: the specifications of the EHR computing platform, archetype development by clinicians and ensuring that we achieve real benefit to the community through implementation trials.
  Pablo think this text must change a little because:
  - How we get engagement without funding?
  - Trust if we don't know where the foundation is going?
  - Trust? engagement? rigour? there is no visibility of the boards from the community, how can they direct if they can't reach the followers? or worst, they don't know who the followers are...
  - Sam Heard says:
    
    These are expressions of concern for this moment. The vision is aimed, perhaps incorrectly, at the end users and community within health care. Here we aim to engender trust in the system. Engagement with clinicians and IT experts (but beyond the developer community) and rigour in what we do and how we test it.
  Pablo Pazos says:
  - I think if we have to solve the worlds problems, first we have to solve problems in home. So, we may change a little the openEHR vision, or we have to change a little the way openEHR do things.