We are pleased to welcome Dr Jordi Piera Jiménez to our Ambassadors Circle. With over 25 years of experience, Jordi is a renowned health informatician and digital health strategist whose work spans applied research, policy advice, and the transformation of integrated care systems.
Our existing ambassador, Joan Cornet Prat, commented on the announcement:
“I have had the honour and privilege of knowing Jordi Piera for many years. He has an enormous and diverse background, with extensive experience. But I have to say that, besides being an excellent professional, he is a great and endearing person. Without a doubt, he will be an ambassador who will bring great value to the Global Health Connector. Welcome, Jordi.”
Jordi currently serves as CEO of openEHR International, where he stewards specifications for open, vendor-neutral health data, and as Head of Research at the TICSalut i Social Foundation. In these roles, he leads the DS3 (Digitalisation for the Sustainability of the Healthcare System) research group, focusing on population risk stratification, health data analytics, and evaluating digital interventions in real-world settings.
Previously, Jordi spent nearly a decade as the Director of Digital Health Strategy for the Catalan Health Service, spearheading the digital transformation of Catalonia’s health and social care system.
A Fellow of both HIMSS (FHIMSS) and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (FIAHSI), Jordi holds a PhD in Information and Knowledge Society, an MBA, and an MSc in Telemedicine, and degrees in Computing Science and Business Management.
Beyond his editorial roles at JMIR and the Journal of Integrated Care, he serves as an advisor to the WHO and OECD on digital health governance and AI primary care, and is a member of the Spanish Society of Medical Informatics, contributing his expertise to global networks and international research consortia.
We sat down with Jordi to discuss his vision for the Ambassador role and how digital health innovation can be translated into real-world impact.
What I am most looking forward to is the chance to connect people and ideas across the boundaries that still fragment our field: between clinical and technical communities, between standards organisations and implementers, and between high-income and low- and middle-income settings. Global Health Connector is unusual in that it takes that convening role seriously, and as Ambassador, I want to help surface work that too often stays siloed within national or institutional borders.
My contribution will draw on two things. First, 25+ years of experience in digital transformation in Catalonia, where we learned, sometimes the hard way, what it takes to move from strategy documents to systems that clinicians and citisens actually use. Second, my new role as CEO of openEHR International, which puts me at the heart of the open standards community working to make health data genuinely portable, vendor-neutral, and reusable for care, research, and public health. I would like to use the Ambassador platform to champion open digital public infrastructure for health, to amplify voices from regions that are often talked about rather than listened to, and to help build the kind of cross-border learning networks that turn isolated successes into shared practice.
After many years doing this at scale in Catalonia, I have become sceptical of the word innovation when it is used to mean novelty for its own sake. Real-world impact tends to come from a less glamorous combination of ingredients.
The first is a clear problem worth solving, defined with the people who live with it. Far too many digital health projects start from a technology looking for a use case. I strongly believe co-creation processes with end users, even if slower and messier than a top-down approach, produce better outcomes that are actually sustained over time.
The second is open standards and interoperability treated as foundational infrastructure, not as an afterthought. If every new solution requires bespoke integration work, innovation does not scale; it accumulates as technical debt. This is why openEHR, HL7 FHIR, SNOMED CT, and the broader standards ecosystem matter so much: they are the plumbing that lets good ideas travel.
The third is implementation science. We now know a great deal about why promising pilots fail to embed. Taking that evidence seriously, and planning for adoption, workflow fit, and sustainability from day one, is what separates a proof of concept from a change in practice.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, governance and trust. Clinicians need to trust the data, citizens need to trust how it is used, and policymakers need mechanisms that allow them to act on evidence without being captured by any single vendor or interest. Without that foundation, even the best technology stalls.
If I had to compress all of this into one sentence, it would be that digital health delivers impact when we stop treating it as a technology project and start treating it as a sociotechnical transformation of how care is organised, governed, and experienced.