Ocean Overview
Ocean Informatics is an Australian health informatics company developing a comprehensive tool set for the construction of open interoperable systems for shared electronic health records. The company combines an active involvement in development of open source health software and standards with the design and construction of a new generation of scalable commercial electronic health record services, components and supporting applications. The innovative OceanEHR suite of tools and applications benefit the patient, the clinician and the health care industry as a whole.
Founded in 1998, Ocean is a unique company, comprising an experienced team with a strong clinical, informatics and software engineering foundation. Collectively the Ocean team has over 100 years of health informatics experience. They share a passion and vision to improve the provision of healthcare to all, through the development of shared health records at local, national and international levels and based on best practice and emerging interoperability standards.
The Ocean Informatics team has a rich record of successful work in health IT standards and systems in Australia, Europe, and the United States that includes ISO, HL7, CEN, Standards Australia, research and academia. Their involvement led to the emergence of openEHR as a new way of structuring, storing and managing patient data so that it can be shared and exchanged between different healthcare providers and other stakeholders in a safe and secure manner. The team is proficient in development of clinical software and implementation of complex IT systems bridging individual desktop clinical applications, web applications and enterprise-wide software systems.
Ocean Informatics has partnered with University College London to establish the openEHR Foundation – a non-profit registered charity – to promote and support the open Electronic Health Record initiative, known as openEHR. The Ocean team has invested considerable resources – time and energy, clinical and engineering expertise, and intellectual capital - in developing the openEHR approach. The Foundation, which owns the openEHR intellectual property and issues licences for its use, now has growing influence in international EHR standards development and is generating opportunities by challenging traditional models of EHR development, and empowering both patients and health-care professionals.
openEHR solves the ubiquitous semantic interoperability problem via a unique approach known as ‘two level modeling’. The implication, and major benefit, of this approach is that clinical information models, known as archetypes, are separated from the underlying data schema, known as the reference model. This revolutionary approach allows clinicians to design and even change the representation of the clinical concepts stored in an EHR without needing to alter the underlying data schema. This enables development of lifelong health records for the first time – truly future-proof EHRs.
Ocean Informatics is leading a cooperative international effort to build open EHR solutions that support the move to interoperable health records and service oriented architectures. These solutions aim to maximise the benefit to patients, clinicians and administrators through the achievement of genuine machine level interoperability – the data recorded in one clinical system is accurately understood and interpretable by second clinical system.
Ocean Informatics is a key contributor to global EHR evolution, by developing one of the most important open source projects in health informatics, and with it the potential for openEHR as the lingua franca of electronic health communication. As a result Ocean Informatics is increasingly seen as the emerging lead architect of the future EHR landscape, and many in Australia and all over the world are looking to Ocean to show the way forward.
Ocean's Austrade Profile
Introductory video