Group will expand on ONC's Connect tools for exchange

Two former senior managers for the Connect gateway program in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT have started a foundation that will expand on the program's open source technology for health information exchange.

Two former senior managers for the Connect gateway program in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT have started a foundation that will expand on the program's open source technology for health information exchange.

The Alembic Foundation will take on a custodial agent role for the open community around the Connect platform under a new name, Aurion, according to an announcement March 21. It also released the Connect code under the Aurion name and will update that version in May.

ONC's Federal Health Architecture (FHA), a group of 26 agencies, developed increasingly detailed versions of Connect, which is a set of software tools and standards for comprehensive health information exchange, to share data between its members.

FHA also released the software to the public, and an open community of developers and programmers has grown around it, fine-tuning its capabilities.