This page is aimed to record ideas to formalize/normalize openEHR education/training and evaluation criteria. This is a place for trainers, to sit down a put our ideas to improve openEHR training.

Does anyone think that a openehr-trainers mail list would be helpful to focus the discussion on those subjects?

Students certification

[Pablo Pazos] I think we should agree on the core topics of any "certifiable" course. Maybe creating an "openEHR training board" that could evaluate each course program an say what course could or not issue openEHR valid certificates to students.

[Evelyn Hovenga] we need to document what an openEHR certified person will be able to do so that employers will have some idea of what the person will be able to achieve for the organisation once employed.

My reading of our overall objectives tells me that we are looking to achieve International consistency in education and training outcomes. That requires quality management and governance of some type. For example openEHR teachers need to have suitable knowledge and skills to take on that task. One entity needs to indicate what suitable knowledge and skills are and govern this. This requires agreed standards/guidelines. 

The process to develop a suitable education/training framework consists of the following steps:• Define roles, functions and high level competency outcome standards
• Analyse and document these into individual units of competency 
• Link units of competency to qualifications at various levels of complexity and intellectual demand to suit any national educational framework.

From the openEHR Foundation perspective I suggest that we develop the overall outcome standards against which individuals who have completed any educational course in any country can be tested to become a certified openEHR practitioner. This is the ITHSDO model. My question is what knowledge and skills does an a certified openEHR practitioner need to have? Is it the same for all? Can we identify some job titles?

From an educational and workforce planning perspective we need to do this in greater detail when following those 3 steps. Each unit of competency needs to have a title, a description/summary that broadly communicates the content and skill area addressed, define employability skills included (these are generic competencies such as communication, teamwork, problem solving etc), any pre-requisite knowledge/skills required, scope regarding its application in the workplace, the competency sector/field [this is where there are many units of competency within the same context at various degrees of complexity such as networks, software engineering), elements of competency and associated performance criteria, required skills and knowledge (what a person needs to know to perform this work), range statements to provide context , essential operating conditions etc, and an evidence guide for assessment purposes.

All Australian nationally endorsed training packages and competency standards are freely available from the Government database at www.training.gov.au , it has a good search engine, these provide good examples of the documentation I'm referring to.

Our students come from different backgrounds, have a variety of previous knowledge and skills and tend to follow different career paths. Ideally our openEHR education framework needs to be able to accommodate these different learning pathways to ensure we can adequately prepare the workforce to maximise the value of adopting openEHR. This can be achieved by developing an openEHR training package similar to any Australian Training Package and making this freely available. This does require a solid governance process and a lot of people willing and able to contribute. If we want to go down that path then we need to develop a strategy to get there.

My suggestion is essentially to focus on desired outcomes for specific roles rather than general course content in the first instance. The work proposed should also assist in defining and reaching agreement about the variety of depth and breadth  about openEHR knowledge and skills needed by the workforce as a whole. From an educational perspective we need to be able to develop both our current and future workforce. As Heather indicates it's not an easy task but a suitable strategy  should be developed.  The openEHR Foundation Board should include this in their deliberations.

Trainers certification

[Jussara Macedo] I was telling that IHTSDO sent a request for candidates to become snomed ct implementation advisors. Ihtsdo will , however, fund their training, and openEHR foundation doesn't have the means to do that. How could we do it effectively without changing the business model of the foundation? Joining efforts with our HIT societies could be a way to achieve it. What do you think?
Australia has a very well developed highly regulated vocational education and training sector that is based on a very sound educational structure that we could use as a guide to design a suitable educational framework for openEHR. I'm happy to assist in this process as we are already engaged in this type of work nationally via the Australian Health Informatics Education Council http://www.ahiec.org.au/ . My colleague, Heather Grain is working with ITHSDO who have also adopted much of the Australian educational framework. They are developing the required educational outcome standards and adopting a credentialing process.

[Pablo Pazos] certification for openEHR trainers would be very difficult with the current business model. IMO we need a loose model to certificate openEHR trainers, and this kind of certification should be based on merit, knowledge and experience on the standard. Those elements could be evaluated by the "openEHR training board" I mentioned before. Obviously, the people on the board should be also choosen by merit and knowledge.

Minimum common topics

[Pablo Pazos]  I think a openEHR course should include the core element: the dual model (IM+AM), at an "above basic" level, something to help students understand the concepts and let them continue investigating after the course ending. To do so, we need to include basic tooling use (I've included the use of the AR, ADLWB and our EHRGen). Maybe that is enough for a clinical modeler profile, but for a developer is not, they need to understand what to implement in software and in wich way. For that I've created a class on "how to implement openEHR in an information system", and I included two approaches: the binding approach (used by Opereffa project) and the autogeneration approach (used by the EHRGen framework). An introductory level course could leave out the tooling chapter.
... trainers could discuss and agree on the core topics of an standard openEHR course, and then create an upper level layer to localize this core topics to the student's profile and the depth level (basic, intermediate, advanced) required by each course.

[Heather Leslie] In my opinion it (certification) should be done under the auspice of the Foundation, and given the changes anticipated perhaps this will be something that can be part of the new Board's vision, but this is definitely not a trivial task.

As a community, I would love to see us start taking some of the initial baby steps to work towards this, mindful that a fully accredited program will likely take time and significant resources.

My reservations reiterate largely Ian's comments – we have done numerous training programs over the past 5 years. Our training material has evolved significantly to reflect the changes in tooling and development of templates, querying, CKM etc to support the practical use and implementation. While this is still in a state of significant flux, and it is likely to be so for some years still, the training will be harder to standardise, but will become gradually easier. In addition, each of our training courses has been configured to reflect the needs/desires of the attendees and this creates an additional overhead  that needs consideration.

[Thomas Beale] As someone who does training from time to time, it seems to me that the only way to certify anything is to design course modules with standardised known outcomes (by the end of this module you will have learned X, Y and Z) rather than trying to standardise what is in the material itself. Personally I find it really hard to standardise anything in this area, because how people learn a given fact depends a lot on their background, current challenges, how they arrived at their current role in an organisation and so on - how you talk to one group e.g. heavily hospital oriented, can be quite different from another, say, mobile nurses, let alone academic researchers, analytics people etc.
Anyway, as Heather says, I have also reduced the 'slides' part of course material a lot and added much more ad lib content based on tools. Also - it's amazing how some of the most important moments in a training course occur on the whiteboard - just to get a key idea across really clearly. 

I think the future is some combination of self-learning modules of video material + class-room / webinar time. Each module (maybe 15 minutes, occasionally 30 mins) teaches just one or two key things. This kind of thing is obviously a big area today in e-learning, and I would think we need to rely on professional educators like Evelyn to provide advice on how we should devise training material for the future.

Evaluation criteria

TODO: for student certification

Governance, policy and funding

[Ian McNicoll] I think we could probably agree the core training requirements quite quickly but the real problem is how any certification process could be policed and funded.

Who trains the trainers, who checks that they are delivering the core content?

In Ocean we certainly have a set of core training materials but these are adapted and amended for every specific customer - the requirements for a clinical audience is somewhat different from a technical audience or mixed audience and time avaialble differs half-day, one day, three day?? ... and again for a vendor client vs. a national organisation. If we have 'certified training', to what extent does that prevent us from adapting content for specific clients and circumstances - I know this is the case for some UK training certification processes. it is one thing to specify the core requirements but quite another to ensure that these are being properly adhered to.

[Pablo Pazos] I think we could break down the problem into certification for students (what they have learned) and certification for trainers (who is validated by the foundation to give quality courses). E.g. a not certificated trainer could make a course for students to study for the certification evaluation, and if they pass, they receive a certification (as students). What is certified here is the evaluation process, not the course itself. The course and the evaluation could be different things, like in english courses (here we pay for a course, and if we want the certificate, we pay for the exam).

Obviously, a course given by a certified trainer could be more costly than a course given by a not-certified trainer, but students from both courses could be certified because de evaluation process is the same, and is supported by openEHR.org. I totally agree that certification processes should have a fee for the foundation, but I think the current funding model should change in order to do that (I participated in a discussion not so long ago where we discuss about funding and governance Community Governance ).

[Carola Hullin] The feedback I got for my part of the world, The americas........the copy and paste approach does not work effectivelly and it got the potential to miss the opportunity to engage the right people for a sustanaible approach. Also, if they are a fee for these courses, I believe the openehr community as foundation should have a part of the profits that colleagues use this material.

Certification in the developing countries is not value as a quality asset , quite the opposite since they do not have much experience with this approach, they use as a commerical propaganda in order to see themselves as a global players.

It is the time to formalise the training approach from the foundation and ensure the rewards to all the hardwork is paid for. This manner the value of openehr is explicit and treat it the way it should be.