Video library
Conversations with the clinicians, architects and builders who have spent decades on the problem of health data - and know what it will take to solve it.
These interviews bring together clinicians, informaticians and builders who have spent years - in some cases decades - working on the problem of health data. Some have led national-scale implementations, some build the software, some hold the governance it depends on, and some are practising clinicians who met the failures of the current system in their own clinics. Each says what is broken, why, and how they responded to it.
"Every barrier you put up leads to people stopping getting healthcare." One of openEHR's original architects, now a practising GP in Aboriginal communities where every unnecessary barrier to a health record has a measurable human cost. Sam raises something no-one else does: the significance of locked health data to families separated by the stolen generations. The architecture for citizen data sovereignty already exists. What is missing is political will.
Empowering Aboriginal Health through openEHR
Dr Ian McNicoll - Clinician-Led openEHR: Micro-Innovations and Community Governance
A UK GP who has spent twenty years building open clinical tools in spite of national programmes, not because of them. Ian explains why meaningful progress in open digital health comes from individuals working around institutional resistance - and what genuine community governance looks like from the inside. Essential if you work in a large health institution and wonder why so little changes.
Dr Sidharth Ramesh - Harnessing openEHR: Eliminating Manual Data Transfers in Clinical Workflows
What changes when doctors stop transferring data manually? Sidharth shows openEHR at the clinical frontline. His framing cuts through the noise of every health IT procurement cycle: applications fail and get replaced every decade. A patient's data should outlast every system that holds it. Only one architecture is built for that reality.
Dr Sam Heard - Empowering Aboriginal Health through openEHR
One of openEHR's original architects, now a practising GP in Aboriginal communities where every unnecessary barrier to a health record has a measurable human cost. Sam raises something no-one else does: the significance of locked health data to families separated by the stolen generations. The architecture for citizen data sovereignty already exists. What is missing is political will.
Gwyn Williams - Digitising Welsh Eye Care: Data as the Basis for Reform
Gwyn Williams is both a consultant ophthalmologist and a Senedd member. He describes years of lobbying that changed little, because waiting times and referral-to-treatment intervals did not exist as data while records were on paper, and argues that closing those gaps is what stands between Wales and a health service that fails.
David Haider - Clinician-Led Deployment and Governance of OpenEyes at Bolton
David Haider inherited an eye unit whose cameras and scanners were, in his words, 'a collection of machines plugged into electricity and nothing else'. He describes the deployment that followed, the community that shaped the product, and the funding weakness he sees in the model that steers it.
Prof JS Bamrah CBE - Applying the Not-for-Profit Custodian Model Across the NHS
Prof JS Bamrah came to Apperta from psychiatry, having concluded that patients were dying of drug side effects that better monitoring would catch. He speaks from outside ophthalmology about what the model offers the wider NHS, and about how little of the sector knows it exists.
Ian Rodrigues - Clinician-Led Procurement and Clinical Safety Review at Guy's and St Thomas'
Ian Rodrigues sat on the clinician-led appraisal that chose OpenEyes at St Thomas', implemented it in the glaucoma service, and now reviews new features for clinical safety. He also uses a different record system daily, and compares what happens when each is told about a problem.
Dr Heather Leslie - Standardising Clinical Data: A Collaborative openEHR Archetype Governance
Without shared clinical knowledge models, interoperability is a word. Heather has spent two decades building the archetype definitions that make it a practice - getting thousands of clinicians to agree on how to define every clinical concept, in every language, across every specialty. The foundational work that makes everything else possible.
Professor David Ingram - 75 Years of Digital Health Innovation
The Emeritus Professor of Health Informatics at UCL watched the NHS spend £12bn on a national IT programme that collapsed. He brings forty years of calibrated perspective to a single question: what will it finally take to get the foundations right? His answer - health data as a utility, noticed only when absent - is the clearest argument for the commons model you will find.
Thomas Beale - Digital Healthcare Architecture: A Semantic, Clinician-Driven Platform
One of openEHR's original architects asks the most important question in digital health: if the technical solution exists, why hasn't it been adopted? His answer is unsettling - and precise. The barriers are commercial, not technical. An industry that profits from fragmentation has every incentive to keep building Swiss plugs.
Andy Meiner - Harmonising Open Standards for Longitudinal Patient Records
Most health IT systems track clinical transactions. Andy asks a different question: what does it take to build infrastructure that serves a human life? His work on longitudinal records - records that follow a person rather than an institution - and his argument that data should outlast every application built to access it, is the clearest case for building to a human timescale rather than a software licence cycle.
James Morgan - Building a Public Asset: Twenty Years of Clinician-Led Development
James Morgan built clinical data systems from the late 1990s, joined forces with the founder of OpenEyes in 2010, and deployed it in Cardiff. He describes the frustration that drove it - talented NHS people with nowhere to put their ideas but a commercial entity - and the funding mechanism that lets five hospitals buy together what none could afford alone.
Patrik Georgii-Hemming - Clinician-Led Digital Transformation at Karolinska
Karolinska had been investing heavily in proprietary digital systems - and getting further from its goals each time. Patrik led the decision to change direction entirely. He explains what it takes to shift one of Europe's most complex health systems onto open infrastructure, and why clinical leadership produces fundamentally different results than vendor procurement.
Dr Jordi Piera Jimenez - Person-Centric Open Health Platform in Catalonia
He built a unified openEHR platform for millions of citizens in Catalonia - and his challenge to every health system leader is direct: when you spend public money on proprietary software, you are not buying a system. You are transferring your region's data sovereignty to a vendor's commercial roadmap. One of the most practically grounded conversations in the series.
Silvio Kimmel - Co-Developing Clinical Apps on openEHR: Vita Group's Open Platform Vision
What does it look like to build clinical software on shared open infrastructure instead of a proprietary platform? Silvio shows what the commons model enables from the inside - better software, built faster, at lower cost, with the whole community sharing in every improvement. No single company can solve all the problems. That's exactly why shared infrastructure matters.
Alex Vidrean - Decentralising Clinical Data Ownership with openEHR EHRbase
Alex builds EHRbase - the open source openEHR repository at the heart of citizen health data sovereignty. He explains why open source is the only model that gives organisations genuine control over their health data infrastructure - and why a commons that people can see, use, and contribute to grows more valuable with every organisation that joins it.
Steve Wilkinson - Commercial Open Source Delivery: Funding, Procurement and Contribution
Steve Wilkinson builds open source health software commercially. He sets out where the money comes from - grants, government and clients rather than licence fees - how contributions arrive from companies abroad with no payment between them, and why procurement teams and investors find the arrangement hard to price.
Clayton Blake - Developing and Sustaining OpenEyes: Delivery Without a Licence Fee
Clayton Blake's company is the main developer and technical custodian of OpenEyes. He sets out a commercial model with no licence fee and no vendor lock-in, why he believes the decision has to be taken nationally, and why he thinks AI has reduced the value of intellectual property as a barrier.
Peter Coates - Custodianship in Practice: Governance, Market Making and the Asset Lock
Peter Coates runs the foundation that holds OpenEyes. He sets out the governing groups that decide what the software does, why the foundation employs no developers, how a hospital buys a system that has no licence to buy, and why the assets are locked so they cannot be sold.
David Jobling - What Open Source Alone Does Not Solve: Governance, Assurance and the Value Chain
David Jobling was part of the team inside the NHS Open Source Programme that set out to level the playing field with proprietary vendors, and found that publishing the code solved very little. He describes what had to be built around it, why the foundation had to sit outside the NHS, and why buyers are purchasing a service rather than a product.