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June 2, 2008

Since last Thursday, the Open Source Health Information Platform (OSHIP) project is now live. It is a Python implementation of the openEHR specifications Release 1.0. OSHIP isn't a clinical application, instead it's a Python framework for quickly building future-proof, inter-operable healthcare applications based on a multi-level modeling principle that has already been proven in many implementations.

How far have we really come in healthcare IT compared to other industries? Why is this? Well, the answer is because healthcare information management is really difficult and expensive and because there are so many stakeholders involved in the management, provision and delivery of healthcare.

Mostly the incentives are so misaligned throughout the industry that we haven't been able to make any real or great headway in interoperability. This is true of free and non-free healthcare software vendors.

On the outset, the openEHR Foundation was created to maintain and promote a set of healthcare specifications developed by a core group of software engineers and health information scientists based on a mantra of implementation.

This focus on creating specifications that actually work in software is quite different than standards by committee as seen so often in various IT settings. Based on almost 20 years of research, development and implementation, openEHR specification Release 1.0.1, was released last year.

These industry specifications as well as the knowledge models are under governance committees consisting of experts from around the world. These committees take input from implementers, developers, medical experts and any other interested party in order to produce the most implementable and therefore useful and inter-operable healthcare IT applications available.

The openEHR Foundation and the subject committees are open to other memberships including, individual, industry and governments.

openEHR implementations are already proven to be capable of exchanging information via HL7v2.x and HL7v3.x. openEHR also defines its own extract mechanism between compliant systems for full semantic information exchange.

The specifications are closely aligned where possible and completely mapped to healthcare information standards and specifications in the spec documents. This gives Linux and open-source developers complete access to all interoperability possibilities.

The openEHR specifications have been selected as part of the CEN healthcare IT standards and they are ISO candidates.

The openEHR specifications are the way to go if you are a healthcare IT developer or healthcare applications company. If you aren't a Python developer then check the resources section for information about your chosen development environment.

If yours isn't there then you should become the first to develop an implementation in your language.

The OSHIP open source code is considered by software management standards to be in an alpha state because it's technically incomplete at the present time. It is important to recognize that OSHIP stands on thousands of lines of well implemented and well tested open source code that is used in thousands of applications around the world.

The underlying focus is on the simplicity of using the z3c packages to develop applications in record time based on a solid model. The OSHIP infrastructure already offers:

Internationalization (i18n)

Localization (i10n)

Robust and granular security model

Segregated demographics

Choice of Web server front-ends

Choice of back ends

Framework capable of managing multiple servers with redundancy

Rapid web-based forms and application creation

A solid, inter-operable and future-proof knowledge model

Overall, the specifications are complete and proven. Leveraging these resources means that OSHIP can and will grow to maturity in a matter of months instead of years. OSHIP uses a combination of technologies to aid the open-source developer.

The innovative virtualenv.py script sets up an isolated environment on your system so that any libraries used or system path changes do not effect the rest of your applications.

Source: The open EHR Foundation.

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