Board statement on Clinical Knowledge Manager
openEHR News | May 15, 2012, 11:43 p.m.
What is Clinical Knowledge Manager?
The Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM) application is used by the openEHR Foundation to provide governance of archetypes, templates and terminology reference sets, and to facilitate discussions and communication about these assets within the openEHR community. The primary functionality is to locate and view the assets, manage the review and publication process and provide maintenance and evolution of these for the future. All of the hosted assets are freely and openly available to view or download at no cost under a CC-BY-SA licence (which may change to a CC-BY license if this is deemed to provide advantage by industry and health care providers).
CKM is a commercial application developed by Ocean Informatics and primarily intended to support national standards and large vendor model development and is provided to the Foundation free of charge, with the underlying Arcitecta Mediaflux asset management engine licensed to the Foundation at a reduced rate.
Why did the openEHR Foundation choose CKM?
The use of a web-based paradigm to support the collaborative clinical governance and maintenance of openEHR clinical models remains leading-edge and as first-of-breed, the Ocean Informatics CKM is currently the only tool which offers the rich functionality required by the Foundation and wider modelling community. The Foundation will continue to work with Ocean Informatics to develop CKM to meet the evolving needs of the community at no cost for participants, ensuring that CKM remains compliant with emerging federated governance standards as other competing tools and repositories appear on the market. The current use of the Ocean Informatics CKM does not preclude the use of equivalent products in the future, should these meet Foundation requirements.
What are the future plans for CKM?
The Foundation is currently considering proposals by Ocean Informatics to offer a paid subscription option within the openEHR CKM, allowing maintenance of a limited set of 'local' archetypes within separate 'domains' for use by smaller organisations, such as academic units, hospitals or SMEs.
Apart from offering value to these organisations, this may present a very useful opportunity to explore the practical demands of distributed governance of openEHR assets between domains. The primary aim is to provide functionality to groups for whom a full CKM deployment may be unnecessary, but depending on detailed costings and hosting arrangements, it may also be possible for the Foundation to receive a proportion of the subscription fees, and the facility be offered to Associates of the Foundation at reduced cost as part of their membership.
openEHR Board of Directors
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