This webinar was hosted by Yellowbrink — a big thank you to the organizers for the opportunity and a platform.
Webinar Recording
Slides
What the Webinar Covers
The International Patient Summary (IPS) is a FHIR Implementation Guide defining how a minimal, speciality-agnostic set of clinical information should be exchanged across borders and care settings. It is one of the cornerstones of EHDS and is gaining adoption across Europe and beyond.
At the same time, openEHR is increasingly used as a data-for-life persistence layer — use-case agnostic, semantically rich, and governed by clinicians. This webinar tries to address how do you get IPS compliance out of an openEHR CDR without resorting to a proprietary integration engine?
The gap between FHIR and openEHR
FHIR was designed for exchange. openEHR was designed for persistence. Both are right for their purpose, but the combination of the two today is typically solved with vendor-specific mappings and expensive ETL pipelines: a proprietary piece stuck between two open standards. The webinar unpacks why this happens, why it is a problem at regional scale, and what an ideal architecture actually looks like.
FHIRConnect — the missing bridge
FHIRConnect is a specification for expressing bidirectional mappings between openEHR and FHIR. Key pillars of the specification are:
- Part of the openEHR ecosystem — the goal is for mappings to live in CKM alongside archetypes, going through the same clinical governance process.
- Vendor agnostic — any engine can implement the spec; openFHIR is the open-source reference implementation.
- Bidirectional — one mapping handles both openEHR → FHIR and FHIR → openEHR, including FHIR Search to AQL translation.
- Community driven — the idea is that a public library with mappings is established so the community can leverage existing work done for other use cases and projects
- Modular — mappings are composed per archetype and per FHIR data type, enabling reuse across domains.
- Extensible — mappings can be extended the same way archetypes can, so for example a national IPS profile only needs to describe the delta on top of the base mapping.
How mappings are written
The webinar walks through the actual mapping workflow and key challenges of a mapping process.
Live IPS demo
The session closes with a live demonstration of openFHIR generating a valid IPS FHIR Bundle directly from an openEHR CDR, without any proprietary integration layer or duplicate FHIR store. The query flow (FHIR Search → AQL → Composition → FHIR) and the create flow (FHIR Bundle → openEHR Composition) are both shown end to end.
Key takeaway
With FHIRConnect and openFHIR you get a fully vendor-neutral architecture based on open standards alone. The openEHR CDR remains your data-for-life foundation; the FHIR layer remains your innovation and exchange surface; and FHIRConnect bridges the two in a scalable, community-governed, and reusable way.
Want to try it yourself? The open-source engine and sandbox are available at open-fhir.com. For a proof of concept tailored to your use case, feel free to reach out.