Interview summary

Andy Meiner is a computer science graduate who has worked in digital health for 35 years, co-chairs openEHR UK, and now focuses on helping vendors lower the barrier to entry into the openEHR ecosystem. His perspective is deliberately practical and commercial - he is less interested in the architecture than in making it work in the real world.

Two personal experiences anchor his motivation. His son was born six weeks early in a city far from home, and the midwives could not read his wife's handwritten notes. His father, with multiple comorbidities, spent years being driven to appointments where the same information had to be repeated to each new clinician. Both stories point to the same structural failure: records that do not follow the patient, and data trapped in systems that do not communicate. His conclusion is that a longitudinal patient record - from cradle to grave - is the foundation on which better care must be built, and that open standards are the only way to achieve it without recreating the proprietary lock-in that caused the problem in the first place.

His contribution to the conversation is framing. He notes that CIOs who five years ago were focused on Wi-Fi and laptops are now beginning to understand that data itself is an asset - a shift he regards as significant and overdue. But he is equally clear that the open standards community communicates badly, speaking to itself in language that causes eyes to glaze over. His response is to reframe: not "open data platform" but "an app store that works with every EHR." The ecosystem he envisions requires clinical data repositories, integration platforms, hyperscalers, vendors committed to interoperability, and delivery consultancies all working in concert. His test for success is simple and personal: a system good enough that his mother would not have had to wheel his father to unnecessary appointments.

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