Salutations de l'EHRCON25 à Barcelone

Just back from the openEHR International conference in Barcelona with student Odette Rios-Ibacache—feeling energized and more convinced than ever about the power of open innovation in healthcare.

This morning, I attended an inspiring talk by Grahame Grieve, the creator of the FHIR standard. Like OpenEHR, FHIR is an open standard transforming healthcare data worldwide. Grahame emphasized that keeping FHIR open—rather than proprietary—was crucial to its success. While a proprietary model could have made a lot of money, it would have sidelined the passionate contributors who drive real impact.

Open-source projects like Opal, OpenEMR, OpenEHR, and FHIR thrive because they’re built by people who care deeply about what they do.

Quebec’s healthcare ecosystem is also full of passionate people—in hospitals, research institutes, and local SMEs. Yet they’re often overlooked in favor of big companies and consultancies that benefit from a procurement process biased toward scale and administrative ease…

As a new organization, Santé Québec has a chance to change this. I urge it to review its procurement policies to prioritize transparency, digital sovereignty, local innovation, and value-based care—not just administrative convenience. This may be more work initially but it will be more affordable and will foster trust, sustainability, and a more motivated healthcare workforce.