About the Forum

The Open Group Healthcare Forum is a global, vendor-neutral consortium advancing enterprise architecture, open standards, and practical guidance to improve healthcare delivery. We bring together healthcare providers, technology companies, government organizations, consultants, academic institutions, and other stakeholders to address the complex clinical, operational, and technological challenges facing modern healthcare. The Open Group Healthcare Forum exists to architect the healthcare enterprise — bridging the gap between strategy and execution, and between business and technology, in an industry where enterprise architecture has historically lagged behind other sectors. Our mission is simple: to help make healthcare information available when and where it’s needed, so that it follows the person, in a timely, accurate, and secure manner, wherever they go for care. We take a holistic, person-centered, systems-oriented approach to this work. We don’t believe healthcare’s challenges are simply technical problems requiring technical solutions — they require understanding the interdependence of the many parts of the healthcare ecosystem: clinical, operational, financial, and regulatory. This approach aligns closely with the goals of Boundaryless Information Flow™, the Triple Aim, the Learning Healthcare System, Value-Based Healthcare, and population health. The Forum is global, vendor-neutral, and business-oriented, bringing together governing bodies, technology vendors, and the provider community — hospitals, healthcare delivery systems, and innovation hubs of every kind — to share best practices and the accumulated wisdom of our membership. Members participate through weekly virtual meetings and quarterly in-person events.

Mission and Vision

The Healthcare Forum is more than a standards body. It is a collaborative community of architects, clinicians, technologists, and business leaders working together to improve healthcare systems through practical, architecture-based solutions.

Healthcare Interoperability

We believe that person-centered, value-based healthcare depends on interoperability. Interoperability enables the flow of information within and across healthcare systems. Information flow based on healthcare system requirements, standards development, and IT implementation systems helps enable actors to produce their core capabilities effectively, error-free, and securely. Learn more

Value Proposition

Healthcare is one of the world's most complex and information-intensive industries. Improving patient care requires more than technology alone; it requires coordinated improvements across clinical practice, business operations, governance, information, and technology. The Healthcare Forum helps organizations bridge strategy and implementation by developing practical architectural guidance that improves interoperability, cybersecurity, operational resilience, and value-based care.

Our Work:

The Healthcare Forum develops enterprise architecture standards, reference architectures, implementation guides, information models, and open-source tools that help healthcare organizations improve clinical care, operational performance, interoperability, cybersecurity, and digital transformation. Working collaboratively across industry, government, academia, and technology providers, Forum members translate emerging ideas into practical guidance that can be applied in healthcare organizations worldwide. Our work bridges strategy and implementation by helping healthcare organizations build the enduring organizational capabilities needed to adapt to changing technologies, evolving threats, and new models of care.

O-VBA (Value-Based Architecture for Healthcare) — a standard giving Enterprise Architects a reusable, extensible tool for continuously improving the value and efficiency of patient-centered care across medical specialties and clinical settings.
FHIM (Federal Health Information Model) and the FHIM Profile Builder (FPB) — an open-source tool that automates the creation of standards-based API profiles, enabling widespread interoperability.
O-HERA (Health Enterprise Reference Architecture) — a downloadable ArchiMate® model and guide for developing implementation reference architectures, usable by healthcare and IT stakeholders of every size.
Ongoing work developing healthcare cybersecurity guidance, in collaboration with The Open Group Security Forum, applying the same architectural rigor to the threats and controls healthcare organizations face today.

Why Join the Healthcare Forum?

Healthcare is too complex for any one organization to solve alone. The Healthcare Forum provides a trusted, vendor-neutral environment where healthcare providers, technology companies, government agencies, consultants, researchers, and academic institutions collaborate to develop practical architectural guidance that addresses real-world healthcare challenges. Members influence the Forum's priorities, contribute directly to standards and guidance, validate emerging ideas through real-world case studies, and help shape the future of enterprise architecture in healthcare. Through this collaboration, organizations gain early insight into emerging practices while building relationships with peers who are committed to improving healthcare delivery worldwide.

Members of the Healthcare Forum have the opportunity to:

• Influence the future of healthcare enterprise architecture by contributing to standards, guides, reference architectures, and open-source tools.
• Collaborate with a global network of experts from healthcare providers, technology companies, government agencies, consulting firms, and academia.
• Apply architecture to real-world challenges, including interoperability, cybersecurity, value-based care, operational resilience, and digital transformation.
• Share and learn from practical experience through case studies, implementation guidance, and peer collaboration.
• Help shape industry direction by participating in a vendor-neutral consensus process that transforms ideas into internationally recognized guidance.
• Build lasting professional relationships with leaders who are advancing healthcare through enterprise architecture.

Healthcare Forum Membership Benefits Healthcare Consultants, Payers, and Providers

• Guide standards development to ensure adoption of necessary requirements for interoperable solutions
• Improve information flow within your organization and with partners in your care delivery ecosystem 
• Address your pressing Healthcare IT business problems
• Engage in regular dialog with diverse healthcare stakeholdders about improved interoperability and information flow
• Drive the healthcare community towards less proprietary, more open solutions to reduce lock-in and improve business efficiencies

• Gain business efficiencies through better information flow with ecosystem partners at a lower cost

   

Healthcare Forum Membership Benefits IT Hardware, Software, and Consulting Services Vendors and Medical Device Vendors

• Influence standards development and gain early access to emerging standards that affect your business
• Gain a clearer and more empathic understanding of customer HIT and EHR pain-points and requirements
• Demonstrate leadership in Healthcare IT – show customers and collaborators your commitment to improving information flow in care delivery and outcomes improvement
• Collaborate with other innovators; prepare for the future; develop key relationships

The Open Group Healthcare Forum is advancing the O-VBA to help healthcare organizations design and improve their enterprises around value creation and outcomes.

The O-VBA is a top-down framework (based in TOGAF) and a bottom-up tool (based in ArchiMate) used to link strategic goals to the capabilities (the what) and the competencies (the how) needed to achieve them. By organizing work around value streams—the end-to-end stages through which healthcare organizations deliver value—the O-VBA helps leaders and teams see how people, workflows, information, and technology interact to produce outcomes that matter to people.

Originally developed for hospitals and healthcare delivery systems, the O-VBA is industry-independent. Its structured approach to mapping value streams and capabilities can be applied across sectors to accelerate transformation, reduce complexity, and align investment with measurable results.

Case Studies: Applying the O-VBA in Practice

The Healthcare Forum has developed and tested the O-VBA through real-world case studies that demonstrate its value in addressing complex clinical and operational challenges:

• Case Study 1: Medication Management Resilience
  A large healthcare system used the O-VBA to strengthen its business continuity planning for medication management during IT outages. By mapping value streams and identifying the capabilities that must function manually or on backup systems, the organization reduced risk and improved clinical response readiness.
   
• Case Study 2: Strengthening Incident Management Communication
  In a separate engagement, the O-VBA was applied to enhance communication pathways during digital disruptions. It helped clarify roles, responsibilities, and information flows across clinical and IT teams, leading to faster decision-making and improved coordination under pressure.

Who It’s For

The O-VBA is designed for:

• Enterprise Architects and transformation leaders seeking to connect strategy with execution
• Healthcare executives and clinical operations teams looking to manage complexity and drive measurable improvement
• IT and digital health professionals aiming to align technology initiatives with business and patient outcomes

What’s Next

The Forum is expanding its O-VBA work through additional case studies and collaborations across industries and regions. These projects continue to demonstrate how a value-based architectural approach can make transformation more actionable, measurable, and sustainable.

About

The Healthcare Forum, in collaboration with the Dutch center of excellence for health IT, Nictiz, has translated and expanded the Dutch ZiRA.  The ZiRA in English Guide is an open-source hospital reference architecture that can be used to solve business problems and improve patient care in any hospital system worldwide.  It is:

• Proven
• Easy to use at no cost
• Continuously enhanced by members of The Open Group Healthcare Forum

The following Files are available to Use the ZiRA in English                
 

* The ZiRA source file (.eap) is modeled with the Enterprise Architect tool from Sparx Systems: www.sparxsystems.com

** The ZiRA Archi file (.archimate) can be (re-)used with the open-source Archi tool: www.archimatetool.com 

The Open Group events are for business and technology professionals interested in achieving business objectives through technology standards. The Open Group organizes conferences, member meetings, industry verticals, webinars, and podcasts on a wide variety of topics.

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