Interview summary

Silvio Kimmel is a product manager at Vita Group, the company behind the open-source EHRbase clinical data repository. His background is unusual for this field - trained physiotherapist, then business administration, then self-taught in IT - and it gives him a practically grounded perspective on where the current system fails and what open standards make possible.

His route to openEHR came through a podcast about CDRs, where Vita Group stood out for its open-source, open-standards approach. Having worked previously at CGM on proprietary hospital information systems, he had seen directly what closed architectures produce: a CIO who cannot say yes to a clinician's specific problem because it means another silo, another integration, another dependency. That ceiling on innovation - where no single company can solve all the problems and yet proprietary systems structurally prevent anyone else from trying - is the problem openEHR directly addresses.

His core argument is about where effort goes. In a proprietary environment, the majority of development time is consumed by the technical integration layer. With open standards as the foundation, that burden shifts: 90% of effort can go to usability and clinical value rather than plumbing. Combined with community - the shared pool of archetypes, models, and knowledge that no single company could produce alone - the result is qualitatively better than anything built behind closed doors. His wish for the industry is straightforward: technology built with the people who have to use it, not delivered to them.

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