Silvio Kimmel

Why open standards free development effort from integration plumbing so it can go into usability and clinical value.

Part of the 2024 openEHR interview series, recorded at EHRCON24 on 5 November 2024 in Reading, UK.

Co-developing clinical apps on openEHR

Vita Group's open platform vision.

You can't solve all of the problems when you are just one company.

About Silvio Kimmel

Silvio Kimmel is Product Manager at vitagroup AG, shaping the open health data platform HIP (based on openEHR and FHIR) to enable domain experts to build applications that improve patient care.

He has a background in clinical software consulting and product management, having worked at Dedalus HealthCare and CompuGroup Medical, and holds qualifications in physiotherapy and business administration.

Interview summary

Silvio Kimmel is a product manager at Vita Group, the company behind the open-source EHRbase clinical data repository. His background is unusual for this field - trained physiotherapist, then business administration, then self-taught in IT - and it gives him a practically grounded perspective on where the current system fails and what open standards make possible.

His route to openEHR came through a podcast about CDRs, where Vita Group stood out for its open-source, open-standards approach. Having worked previously at CGM on proprietary hospital information systems, he had seen directly what closed architectures produce: a CIO who cannot say yes to a clinician's specific problem because it means another silo, another integration, another dependency. That ceiling on innovation - where no single company can solve all the problems and yet proprietary systems structurally prevent anyone else from trying - is the problem openEHR directly addresses.

His core argument is about where effort goes. In a proprietary environment, the majority of development time is consumed by the technical integration layer. With open standards as the foundation, that burden shifts: 90% of effort can go to usability and clinical value rather than plumbing. Combined with community - the shared pool of archetypes, models, and knowledge that no single company could produce alone - the result is qualitatively better than anything built behind closed doors. His wish for the industry is straightforward: technology built with the people who have to use it, not delivered to them.