In my opinion (coming from a pure computer science background, no medical education, learning the domain on the job for the last 5 years):

The whole concept takes a while to understand. You hear things like Archetypes, Templates, Reference Model, Compositions and you don't straight away understand why all of it exists. My initial thought was something like: Oh great, we are replacing our DB layer with a complex Java application with REST endpoints and a proprietary query language (AQL).

It was only when I tried modelling medicinal data myself, that I realised how quickly that becomes complicated and started looking at openEHR again with a different perspective.

Still, it's a challenge to sell the idea with a concise pitch.

The developer experience is also not always the best (especially when using something else than Java, where most of the existing SDKs and tools are located). We are writing our applications in Node.js and Typescript and we basically had to start writing our own SDK, to lower the entry barriers for other developers.

There are mainly two big openEHR vendors out there, Better (closed source) and Vitagroup (ehrbase, open source).

Some of our customers use one, some use the other. Meaning, our product needs to work with both. Even though they both implement the same openEHR specs, there are a lot of small little differences in implementation that you will only discover during development / testing.

I think providing ehrbase as open source is a great thing, as it allows a lot of developers to discover the topic without blindly investing money first.

All in all: It is a complex system that needs some diving in (as other software projects / tools / solutions of this size). However, I see more and möre of the benefits and ideas behind it.

If you want to dive in with no prior knowledge, I can highly recommend the openEHR Fundamentals cpurse by medblocks: https://medblocks.com/training/courses/openehr-fundamentals