The global openEHR leader will highlight national-scale clinical knowledge management, emerging co-modelling approaches, and the infrastructure needed to turn open health data standards into practical health system capability.
September 2026: Ocean Health Systems will join global digital health leaders at EHRCON26, taking place on 22 and 23 September 2026 at the Meervaart Theatre in Amsterdam.
Bringing together clinicians, researchers, health system leaders, vendors and openEHR experts, EHRCON26 will explore the future of open health data standards, interoperability and agentic AI.
Ocean Health Systems will use the conference to demonstrate how openEHR is moving beyond technical implementation and becoming a foundation for national and regional health care development, clinical knowledge governance and sustainable digital health transformation.
As one of the organisations that has helped shape the openEHR ecosystem for more than 25 years, Ocean is increasingly focused on making enterprise openEHR practical. Its work spans clinical knowledge management, interoperability, infection prevention and surveillance, workforce immunisation, analytics and real-world health system implementation.
Ocean Health Systems CEO Lukas Eksteen said the openEHR conversation was entering a new stage.
“The market is no longer asking whether openEHR can work. The question is how health systems establish the governance, capability and partnerships required to make it work at scale. Ocean’s role is to help organisations move from openEHR ambition to sustainable operational capability.”
From clinical models to shared health system infrastructure
Ocean’s Clinical Knowledge Manager was developed to help health systems govern clinical knowledge independently of individual software applications.
CKM supports the collaborative development, review, publication and reuse of archetypes, templates, termsets and release sets. It gives clinicians, informaticians, programme teams and technology partners a governed environment in which clinical knowledge can be maintained as a durable health system asset.
Ocean Health Systems’ openEHR work is supported by major national, regional and enterprise initiatives. These implementations provide proof that governed clinical knowledge can move beyond isolated modelling projects and become shared infrastructure that creates momentum for wider adoption.
Dr Seref Arikan, Technical Lead at Ocean Health Systems, said CKM should increasingly be understood as a platform for digital health collaboration, rather than simply a repository for clinical models.
“CKM not only materialises a core pillar of openEHR methodology, putting clinicians in control, but it also strengthens that pillar through collaboration. As the first and still the largest group of CKM stakeholders, clinicians have led the global growth of openEHR through their collaborative efforts. Now, however, we are seeing this stakeholder base expand to include other groups: system implementers, scientists, and other standards communities. We are excited about the emerging, even greater potential of CKM, especially in the context of Europe and its EHDS framework.”
As European health systems respond to evolving interoperability requirements, including the European Health Data Space, the ability to govern computable clinical knowledge across organisational and national boundaries is becoming increasingly important.
Ocean Health Systems believes this requires more than compliance with a technical standard. It requires strong governance, active clinical participation, transparent publication processes, and platforms capable of supporting collaboration over time.
Advancing co-modelling and computable clinical knowledge
At EHRCON26, Ocean Health Systems will also contribute to emerging discussions about co-modelling and the next generation of computable clinical knowledge.
Dr Sam Heard, Ocean Health Systems co-founder and one of the original architects of openEHR, is undertaking work examining how smaller, precise, and reusable clinical models can support the implementation of flexible digital health applications and emerging AI-enabled workflows.
This work considers how more limited clinical concepts can be specified, shared, compared, aggregated, and governed without losing their meaning, provenance, or clinical integrity.
Dr Heard said:
“Agentic AI will increase the value of precise, computable clinical data, but AI cannot compensate for poorly structured or weakly governed data. Co-modelling can give systems smaller, re-usable, shared units of meaning that remain clinically safe, explainable and interoperable.”
The work reflects Ocean’s continued role in advancing the underlying approaches that make openEHR practical for health systems, implementers and technology partners.
Ocean Health Systems at EHRCON26
Ocean Health Systems representatives participating in EHRCON26 include:
- Seref Arikan
- Session: Interoperability
- Topic: Scaling the EHDS with an openEHR/FHIR Co-Modelling Platform – and a Realistic AI Strategy – A take on the answers to the question: How can openEHR help the EHDS?
- Sebastian Garde:
- Session: “Research”
- Topic: Clinical Knowledge Management: The Good, the Bad and the Mappings – This presentation explores lessons learned from years of CKM practice, examining what effective governance enables, where challenges persist, and why mapping between healthcare standards is often far more complex than it first appears.
- Chunlan Ma:
- Session: Compliance & Conformance
- Topic: Multiprac: Turning clinical data into actionable infection surveillance
Find the full programme here: https://openehr.org/ehrcon26/programme/
Building momentum for openEHR adoption
Ocean Health System’s presence at EHRCON26 reflects a broader shift in its market position.
The company is no longer simply participating in the openEHR ecosystem. It is helping health systems establish the governance, platforms, implementation capability and operating models required to make enterprise openEHR sustainable.
Through major customers, national and regional programmes and more than two decades of practical digital health experience, Ocean is helping demonstrate what successful openEHR adoption looks like. Each implementation creates reusable knowledge, evidence and confidence that can make it easier for other organisations and jurisdictions to begin their own openEHR journey.
Mr Eksteen elaborates: “Market growth will come from proven implementations, shared knowledge and strong partnerships. Our responsibility is to create momentum, reduce the risk for those coming next, and help build an ecosystem in which more organisations can succeed.”
EHRCON26 will be held on 22 and 23 September 2026 at the Meervaart Theatre in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
For more information about Ocean Health Systems, visit www.oceanhealthsystems.com
About Ocean Health Systems
Ocean Health Systems has partnered with the healthcare community for more than 25 years to improve the way clinical information is structured, governed, exchanged, and used.
A pioneer of openEHR technology, Ocean developed the world’s first openEHR clinical data repository and Clinical Knowledge Manager. Today, its capabilities span clinical knowledge governance, interoperability, infection prevention and surveillance, workforce immunisation, analytics and enterprise digital health implementation.
Ocean works with healthcare organisations, government agencies, researchers, standards bodies and technology partners to make open, interoperable and clinically governed digital health systems practical at scale.
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