Charter Projects

The technical goal of Open Health Tools is to assemble and/or develop a comprehensive harmonized tool suite to enable the definition, development and deployment of interoperable Electronic Health Records.  The complexity of both modern IT platforms and the healthcare domain means that first class tools are an absolute necessity. 

Charter Projects are those projects whose charter is approved by the OHT Board of Stewards, and whose scope is intended to fulfill the technical goal of Open Health Tools. Charter Projects cover the life cycle of EHRs in the broadest sense including development of standards, architectures, documentation and training, legacy systems etc.  Information, including source code, project descriptions, blogs and forums for each project can be access from the project repository home page.

The Architecture Council has developed several documents that govern the principles and vision of the Charter Projects. These include:

  1. The Architecture Working Principles
  2. The Architecture Guiding Principles
  3. The Architecture Vision
  4. The Standards Vision
  5. The Tooling Architecture Vision

There are currently seven Charter Projects that either have been approved to proceed, or approved in principle. They are:
Academic Outreach Project Oracle Approved in Principle (2007/11/15)

The Academic Outreach Project is an open software research and development project modeled on a similar outreach activities at the Eclipse Foundation. The Project encapsulates three related activity streams, each of which is based on, or uses the OHT Platform and/or Open Health Tools:

  1. student research projects and other exploratory investigations ("Research Stream")
  2. development of educational materials, teaching aids, and courseware ("Education Stream")
  3. incubation of small-scale, innovative platform and tools projects ("Incubators Stream")

(See Charter, update slides and the project itself is here)
HL7 Tooling NHS Approved (2007/11/15)

The OHT HL7 Tooling Project is an open software development project which aims to provide second generation tools to support the HL7 version 3 message modeling methodology. The toolset will be based on the Eclipse Platform and/or Eclipse Tools. The HL7 tools supporting the v3 message modeling methodology will be designed to be an integral part of a wider suite of tools covering conformance/testing, clinical modeling and terminology maintenance. (See Charter, introductory slides and update slides)
Conformance Services Canada Health Infoway Approved in Principle (2007/11/15)

To support implementation of standards within projects through the provision of conformance testing of artefacts and tooling. (See introductory slides and update slides.)
Privacy, Access and Security Services Inpriva Approved (2007/11/15)

The mission of the Privacy, Access and Security Services (PASS) project is to provide a set of encapsulated, loosely-coupled and composable service components that can cotnribute to ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of healthcare information within a service-oriented framework. (See charter, introductory slides and update slides.)
Modeling Tools for Healthcare Veterans Health Administration and IBM Approved in Principle (2008/04/14)

The Modeling Tools for Healthcare Project will focus on enabling model-based development technologies withing the OHT community. It will unite projects falling into this classification to bring holistic model-driven development capabilities to OHT. (See charter and slides.)
Health Information Interoperability OHT and the Oregon Department of Human Services Approved in Principle (2008/04/14)

The Health Information Interoperability Project (“HII Project”) is an open source software development project to enable interoperability between Oregon’s Medicaid Transformation Grant Health Record Bank and selected organizations’ electronic health record systems and other health information sources. (See charter.)
SNOMED CT Tooling Project IHTSDO Approved in Principle (2008/04/14)

The Open Health Tools SNOMED CT Tooling Project is an open software development project, which aims to provide second generation tools which can be used to develop, maintain, promote and enable the uptake and correct use of SNOMED CT in health systems around the world. (See charter and slides)