Ocean Story
Ocean Informatics is a company formed amongst colleagues with a goal: to achieve interoperability of electronic health records. It began in 1998 after Sam Heard and Thomas Beale had, after many years at the drawing board, invented the idea of expressing the shared clinical content specifications of a health record in a separate manner from the core health record itself. This approach, now an international standard and known as the ‘archetype methodology’ excited Peter Schloeffel, who was a leading light in international standards development in this domain and David Rowed, who was working with message standards in Australia and abroad. Interestingly, between the four, they had 2 computer science degrees, 2 engineering degrees and 3 medical degrees as well as considerable experience in writing software.
Initial developments were funded through research and development grants through the general practice computing group. This enabled the first ‘archetype editor’ to be created. All the while the group worked within the standards community, lead by Peter Schloeffel at ISO but involving the whole group: taking key roles in the creation of the ISO EHR requirements, the HL7 EHR Functional Model and the CEN and now ISO EHR standard as well as national message standards. Ognian Pishev, with a wealth of international diplomatic and business experience, joined the company to help develop a global business approach.
Dipak Kalra and David Ingram at University College London have been critical in the CEN and ISO standardisation process and the establishment of the openEHR Foundation in 2002. This has allowed the publication of the EHR specifications and Archetype methodology to be backed and protected by a major international institution and provided a firm base for building a strong global community who share Ocean’s and UCL’s goals.
In 2004, when there was clearly no real advance in the solutions to provide interoperability of health records, Ocean decided to grow a little and produce the software and tools to really demonstrate the benefit of the openEHR approach. Joined by Heath Frankel, an experienced developer and expert in the messaging world, and a formidable threesome from the Health IT industry – Heather Leslie, George Hayworth and Hugh Leslie – Ocean set about building an expert team and producing software that would enable companies to launch their clinical software from a solid openEHR platform.
The first prototype EHR servers were shared with collaborators and modelling tools demonstrated in 2006. In 2007, the UK NHS took a giant step for mankind and shifted their clinical modelling processes from HL7 to openEHR. This sent a strong message to the world that current best practice, when applied at scale, was not suitable for purpose. At Medinfo in 2007 the meetings on openEHR were packed with people sitting on the floor and the Ocean stand was buzzing – one evening another company lead counted 43 people at the Ocean stand when there were no other people left in the exhibition stall.
Ocean is working at all levels of the collective effort to get interoperability off the ground. The openEHR specifications, their maintenance and reference software implementations are critical to this longstanding ambition. The community of clinicians and technicians that has joined the action is now able to use professional clinical modelling tools and engage in the process through a transparent web-based process. Clinical software developers who want to move away from the issues of integration and communication can now build on a standardised platform and work to a consolidated health record. This record can evolve and respond to local and international developments without requiring massive redevelopment by the application providers.