OSEHRA 2012: Spotlight On 1st Annual Open Source EHR Summit and Workshop

We recently posted about Ken Mandl’s participation in a panel at the OSEHRA 1st Annual Open Source EHR Summit and Workshop. Audio and slides are now available to those with OSEHRA user accounts; scroll to Day One, 3pm, “Open Source Best Practice and Business Models.”

Now we’d like to back up and talk briefly about OSEHRA itself, and share links that highlight its relationship to SMART.

OSEHRA (pronounced “Oh Sarah”) is the Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent. It launched in August of 2011 when the Veterans’ Administration and Department of Defense took up the challenge of uniting and converting their EHR systems—two of the largest in the country—from proprietary to open source, using VistA as a technical starting point. A project of this magnitude needs an organizational structure to foster the community of EHR users, developers, and researchers, as well as a framework for the code repository and software standards. That’s where the “Agent” part comes in. For more on its formation, see OSEHRA’s press releases and news coverage.