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:
- The Architecture Working Principles
- The Architecture Guiding Principles
- The Architecture Vision
- The Standards Vision
- The Tooling Architecture Vision
There are currently eleven Charter Projects that either have been approved to proceed, or approved in principle. They are:
| Academic Outreach Project | Oracle | Approved in Principle (Nov. 2007) |
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:
- student research projects and other exploratory investigations ("Research Stream")
- development of educational materials, teaching aids, and courseware ("Education Stream")
- incubation of small-scale, innovative platform and tools projects ("Incubators Stream")
(See Charter and update slides. The project itself may be found here)
| HL7 Tooling | NHS | Approved (Nov. 2007) |
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 (Nov. 2007) |
To support implementation of standards within projects through the provision of conformance testing of artifacts and tooling. (See introductory slides and update slides.)
| Privacy, Access and Security Services | Inpriva | Approved (Nov. 2007) |
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.)
| Model Driven Health Tools | Veterans Health Administration and IBM | Approved in Principle (Apr. 2008) |
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 DHS | Approved in Principle (Apr. 2008) |
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 (Apr. 2008) |
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)
| Supply Chain Tooling Project | International Technology Group | Approved in Principle (Apr. 2008) |
The mission of the Supply Chain Tooling project is to create a set of open source tools allowing providers of Supply Chain Solutions for Healthcare and various Healthcare organizations to synchronize and enhance medical product information between all supply chain participants, categorize and attributize medical product information for providing supply chain optimization services to their clients. (See charter and slides)
| IHE Profiles Project | IBM | Approved (Jul. 2008) |
The IHE Profiles Charter Project is an open source project focusing on Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) interoperability profiles. The IHE Profiles project aims to lower the barriers to healthcare system interoperability by providing client and sever-side software implementations for use in end user applications. Current IHE profile support focuses on patient identity management, document sharing, and security and privacy. (See charter)
| Canadian EHR | Mohawk | Approved (Apr. 2009) |
The Canadian EHRS Reference Implementation project aims to build, with public and private sector partners, a working EHR system prototype based on the Infoway EHRS blueprint utilizing the pan-Canadian health information messaging standards. (See charter and slides)
| OpenExchange | MOSS - Misys Open Source Solutions |
Approved (Jan. 2010) |
OpenExchange platform provides standards based core infrastructure to exchange patient health information in a secure and timely manner, to advance the quality, safety and efficiency of healthcare delivery. The platform is a critical element of HIE infrastructure that provides clinicians and other members of the healthcare community with the right information at the right time by making patient information available across organizational boundaries. It facilitates and streamlines the sharing of patient information throughout an HIE community.
| Application Integration Platform | NexJ |
The Application Integration Platform (AIP) comprises the NexJ Express platform. NexJ Express is a complete and robust open source platform that allows health care organizations and other interested parties to deliver model-driven, enterprise-grade applications that are interoperable and people-centered.
Developed in close consultation with Open Health Tools, NexJ Express is based on the 10th generation of the NexJ Application Framework, a commercial platform for deploying people-centered enterprise solutions. It is a services oriented architecture-based (SOA), model-driven platform that is expressly designed for building highly scalable solutions that are easy to customize and integrate with other systems.
