New openEHR technology and clinical collaboration in vital steps toward improved patient care and true interoperability: Scotland’s first digital ReSPECT emergency care plan

Objective To deploy a digital application of the Recommended Summary Plan for Emergency Care and Treatment (ReSPECT) across health boards (HBs).Methods Clinicians, patients and other regional stakeholders collaborated with the Scottish National Technology Service (NTS) defining requirements. Development was agile with user feedback.Results The ReSPECT web application developed on Scotland’s National Digital Platform used an openEHR Clinical Data Repository. Plans can be viewed and edited across settings. Deployed in 2020, by July 2025, 8 of 14 HBs were onboarded and >5500 patients had digital ReSPECT plans.Discussion openEHR structures clinical data in a modular way, enabling other applications to use the same data layer. Close collaboration between technicians and users fulfilled the application’s requirements and solved problems together.Conclusions Collaboration on the digital ReSPECT accelerated deployment, enabling more people’s wishes and clinical recommendations to be captured and shared across care settings and transitions. openEHR technology enables new data uses.