New 40-page guide brings together survey evidence, documented implementations and an 18-KPI purchasing framework to help global EHR buyers preserve clinical information, modernize incrementally and expand innovation.
AMSTERDAM, NL / ACCESS Newswire / September 18, 2026 / Black Book Research has released “openEHR 2026-2027: Turning Open Architecture into Buyer Advantage,” a comprehensive guide for healthcare organizations evaluating how open clinical-data architecture can support modernization, patient participation and greater flexibility in technology purchasing.
The publication arrives ahead of EHRCON26, the openEHR conference taking place September 22-23 at Amsterdam’s Meervaart Theatre, with a pre-conference clinical-modeling workshop on September 21. The conference will bring together clinicians, researchers, healthcare leaders, developers and vendors to discuss interoperability, the European Health Data Space, patient-centered care and emerging AI applications.
Black Book’s report connects those discussions to practical purchasing decisions: what buyers can implement now, which vendor and delivery models fit different requirements, and how organizations can retain useful clinical information as applications and suppliers change.
“Healthcare organizations should not have to choose between improving care today and protecting their options tomorrow,” said Doug Brown, Founder of Black Book Research. “The opportunity with openEHR is to build clinical capabilities around information that remains useful beyond the life of a single application. Our report helps buyers translate that opportunity into a service they can select, procure and operate successfully.”
Survey Evidence Identifies Both Established Use and Further Opportunity
The publication builds on Black Book’s earlier years’ openEHR research, which included global surveys of users and stakeholders in 2024 and 2025, spanning technology executives, clinical informaticians, national health-authority representatives and digital-health architects. The 2026 buyer guide extends that work through a review of implementation accounts, technical documentation, supplier developments and emerging research
Black Book interprets the findings as an opportunity to build on clinical deployment with governed reuse for research, analytics and additional services. Its recommendation is to fund the work between storing information and making that information consistently useful: clinical-model governance, terminology, permissions, data quality and validation.
“A clinical-data repository is a foundation, not the final outcome,” Brown said. “The next advantage comes when an organization can reuse approved clinical definitions, introduce another useful application and support legitimate research without repeatedly reconstructing the same information.”
Documented Implementations Give Buyers Concrete Reference Points
The report highlights several distinct implementation pathways rather than treating every openEHR deployment as a wholesale hospital-system replacement:
- England: patient participation in shared care planning. The Universal Care Plan programme reported approximately 100,000 people with a care plan in May 2026, when it introduced phased access allowing patients to create or update key personal sections through the NHS App and web login. The example demonstrates a patient-facing service built around shared information and care preferences.
- Spain: Catalonia clinical-data infrastructure at regional scale. vitagroup reports more than 13 million electronic health records migrated and over 1.3 billion clinical compositions managed through its openEHR-based infrastructure, delivered with IBM through Viewnext. These supplier-reported measures describe stored records and clinical content, not a count of current residents or independently verified clinical outcomes.
- Norway: consolidation into a regional clinical system. Sykehuspartner reported completion of the regional DIPS Arena rollout in November 2025, including the transition from nine installations to one shared southeastern regional installation. The implementation illustrates how an established clinical-system supplier can participate in openEHR-based modernization.
- The Christie (UK NHS): specialty services integrated into clinical work. Better’s named-customer case study reports 39 electronic patient-reported outcome forms, deployment across 54 outpatient clinics, and more than 32,000 completed forms. These implementation measures provide a concrete reference for organizations assessing specialty applications and patient-reported information within an existing clinical environment.
- Ireland provides another model: phased expansion of a Shared Care Record alongside existing source systems. HSE’s 2026 implementation update documents additional datasets and widening access, illustrating a modernization pathway focused first on making information available across care settings.
Black Book recommends that prospective buyers assess these examples by service scope, operating context and transferable implementation lessons. Deployment scale and utilization are useful evidence, but local business cases still require their own measures of clinical usefulness, workload, costs and sustained adoption.
Vendor Innovation Is Broadening the Available Routes to Modernization
The report’s supplier and ecosystem coverage includes Better, vitagroup and EHRbase, Cambio, DIPS, Ocean Health Systems, Cadasto/CODE24, CaboLabs and Medblocks, alongside implementation and integration partners.
Rather than placing repositories, hospital systems, modeling tools and consultancies into one undifferentiated ranking, the guide compares their roles in delivering a complete service.
One development examined is the April 2026 partnership between Tieto Caretech, x-tention and Better, combining clinical applications, integration and delivery capabilities with an open, standards-based platform approach for the German-speaking European market.
The report also reviews announced innovations in AI-assisted integration and clinical-data reuse, including vitagroup’s HIP Smart Integrator and Savana Manager Suite’s addition to Better’s Marketplace. These developments address different tasks: assisting with legacy-data integration and extracting useful information from clinical narratives for research and analysis. Their purchasing value depends on the proposed use case, validation and operating model.
Black Book’s central recommendation is to evaluate the complete delivered capability-including clinical applications, data, interfaces, governance and support-not simply the presence of an open standard.
An 18-KPI Framework Turns Architectural Interest Into Purchasing Decisions
The report gives buyers an 18-KPI evaluation framework covering clinical-record fidelity, migration completeness, component replaceability, clinical-model reuse, terminology and localization, conformance, interoperability, usability, patient participation, AI traceability, secondary-use readiness, performance, security, resilience, delivery, support, lifecycle costs and sustained benefit.
The framework is accompanied by buyer-controlled demonstration scenarios, a procurement evidence schedule, whole-life cost considerations and a staged implementation roadmap. Its KPIs are criteria for evaluating specific offerings.
The guide also addresses circumstances in which an integrated EHR suite, a FHIR-centered solution or a targeted extension of existing systems may offer a better operational fit. Its recommendation is selective modernization: start with a defined clinical or information-access problem, establish a usable service, and reuse the resulting capabilities where they deliver additional value.
“The openEHR community deserves credit for making clinical-data independence a practical subject for healthcare procurement,” Brown said. “As the community gathers in Amsterdam, our message to buyers is constructive: start with the care capability you need, learn from documented implementations, and preserve the clinical knowledge and purchasing options you will need next. Supporting open architecture and demanding successful delivery are complementary objectives.”
Report Availability and Research Scope
“openEHR 2026-2027: Turning Open Architecture into Buyer Advantage – Global vendor innovation, clinical data independence and practical pathways to EHR modernization” contains 40 pages and 46 linked references.
The publication reviews evidence available through Q3, distinguishing health-system operational accounts, supplier-reported implementation measures, technical specifications and emerging research. It is an independent Black Book buyer guide, not an openEHR certification document or conference-sponsored publication.
Complimentary copies may be requested from Black Book Research by healthcare buyers, public authorities, clinical informatics leaders, procurement teams and members of the media at research@blackbookmarketresearch.com
About Black Book Research
Black Book Research provides independent healthcare technology market intelligence, vendor-performance research and global industry analysis to support technology selection, implementation and operating decisions. Its research library serves healthcare providers, payers, public authorities, investors and other industry stakeholders.
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SOURCE: Black Book Research
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