Interview summary

Sidharth Ramesh is a practising physician turned founder and CEO of Medblocks, a company building openEHR-based products and training programmes out of India. His entry point to openEHR is the most direct of the interviews in this set: he experienced the problem firsthand as a junior doctor, waking at 5am to spend three or four hours manually copying lab data between two systems that had no interest in talking to each other - data that already existed in digital form, trapped by vendor indifference and proprietary architecture.

His analysis of the current landscape is blunt. The interoperability problem is getting worse rather than better, because as more systems are added, the complexity grows exponentially. Where you once had one or two systems to manage, you now have four or more, each connected to the others in specific ways, making administration more risk-averse and change more dangerous. The solution he describes is the same one that runs through all these interviews: move from N systems talking to each other to a common shared data platform that all applications sit on top of. Applications die; data must not.

His single most pointed contribution is on process. The most technically correct openEHR implementation will produce garbage if the processes for entering data are broken - illustrated by a dropdown menu in an Indian hospital where type 1 diabetes was the first option and therefore selected 90% of the time despite being rare in the population. His closing challenge to the community is direct: data quality is only as good as the processes that create it, and talking about data standards without addressing process standardisation is not enough.

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