Electronic Health Record (EHR)

See the following -

OSEHRA Community Responds to the Federal Government's Proposed Open Source Policy

The OSEHRA community today submitted a response to the "Draft Open Source Policy for Federal Agencies" released by the White House on March 10. The policy was open for comments through today. This is a major milestone for the OSEHRA community as well as the open source community as a whole. Currently the US Government spends nearly a hundred billion dollars a year on software purchased from the private sector or procured from government contractors. Most of this software acquisition ends up in failure. President Barack Obama has made it a priority to shift technology acquisition policies to solve this problem and restore technology innovation by embracing open source.

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OSEHRA Community Responds to the VA's RFI for eHMP Agile Development Contract Strategy

In recent days, OSEHRA Community Members have enthusiastically collaborated to develop a response to VA’s Request for Information (RFI) for a contract strategy that is suitable for agile development of Enterprise Health Management Platform (eHMP). I would like to thank more than 50 members who contributed in developing the final document that OSEHRA submitted today on behalf of the community.  Many members participated in community discussions, shared documents, and provided great ideas. We hope that our response accurately presents the depth and breath of expertise and commitment to excellence that has been shown by the OSEHRA Community.

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OSEHRA Community Undertakes Long-Elusive Alignment of VistA Code Base

Press Release | OSEHRA | November 25, 2014

The first Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) VistA Code Alignment Workshop was held in Oakland, California, November 19-21, 2014. An unprecedented effort, the workshop brought together 27 principal developers of VistA from government and private organizations dedicated to open source solutions for the challenges facing healthcare. The primary objective of the workshop was to achieve compatibility among contributed code within the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), the EHR software used at approximately 2,500 facilities worldwide. “A VistA code base with a common community-aligned platform will allow an unimpeded exchange of innovations and reduce duplicitous developments among users and developers,” said Dr. Seong K. Mun, President of OSEHRA. Read More »

OSEHRA Corporate Membership Doubles as Interest in Open Source EHRs Surges

Press Release | OSEHRA | November 3, 2014

The Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) is pleased to announce that its Corporate Membership has doubled in the latter half of 2014. This expansion demonstrates a growing interest in open source and follows OSEHRA’s very successful 3rd Annual Open Source Summit. Read More »

OSEHRA Debuts 2015 Innovation Webinar Series

Press Release | OSEHRA | January 16, 2015

OSEHRA is excited to announce confirmed speakers for the Innovation Webinar Series, an engaging and free online event hosted monthly by OSEHRA, its members, and those on the forefront of open source. Read More »

OSEHRA Proposes Visionary Open Digital Health Platform for the VA

The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) recently released a Request for Information (RFI) calling for advice on how to build an open, "interoperable digital health platform." The RFI received 40 responses. Only one of those was publicly released, the one from OSEHRA. That the open source EHR organization was the only one that has been open in their submissions, by itself, tells a story. There are some in the VA proposing replacing the open source VistA EHR with a "Commercial" lock-in product. Proprietary EHR vendors are circling the VA like sharks smelling blood in the water, and they don't want the public to know what they are up to...The OSEHRA response below. Note that several dozen OSEHRA member companies and associates participated in drafting this response.

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OSEHRA Receives ANSI Accreditation as a Standards Development Organization

Press Release | OSEHRA | February 24, 2015

The Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) is pleased to announce that it has been accredited as a Standards Development Organization (SDO) by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).  This accreditation allows OSEHRA to begin utilizing its approved operating procedures to document consensus and create OSEHRA-sponsored American National Standards. “We are very proud to have received accreditation,” said Dr. Seong K. Mun, President of OSEHRA.  “The forthcoming OSEHRA quality standard and the associated certification process will raise trust and confidence in newly introduced code, adding value and strength to the open source community.”

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OSEHRA Releases Upgrade to popHealth for the 2018 Clinical Quality Measure Reporting Criteria

Press Release | OSEHRA | March 22, 2018

The Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) announced today the release of the Version 5.1 of the popHealth® open-source clinical quality measure database and reporting engine. The new release maintains its 2015 Edition Health IT Module certification for Clinical Quality Measure (CQM) reporting criteria: (c)2-4, (d)1-3, (g)4, and (g)5 for the Calendar Year 2018 performance period. This release is the culmination of collaborative efforts by members of the OSEHRA popHealth Steering Work Group and the Developer Open Source Project Group. In particular, the Alabama State Medicaid committed significant development resources to achieve the attestation certification for the 2018 performance period.

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OSEHRA to Hold Kick-Off Meeting for VistA Internationalization Project

OSEHRA Chairman Seong K. Mun will be holding a kick-off meeting for the recently announced VistA Internationalization project called Plan VI...This is an important project as the open source VistA electronic health record is being adopted internationally at a rapid pace. There are large numbers of VistA deployments in Jordan and India, and great interest in South Korea, Japan, and China. The Internationalization project should accelerate the international adoption of the EHR, ranked as the best hospital-based EHR in the world.

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OSEHRA's First Challenge: VistA Version Control

Fred Trotter | O'Reilly Radar | October 20, 2011

There are several challenges that the Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA) faces, and many of them sit squarely between technical and political issues. The first question any open-source project must answer is: "Who can commit?" That's almost immediately followed by: "How do we decide who can commit?" But to manage VistA OSEHRA, we must first ask: "How do we commit?" There i Read More »

OSEHRA's Synthetic Patient Data Project Group Releases End-to-End Open Source Patient Data Software Package

Press Release | OSEHRA, Perspecta, MITRE | July 1, 2019

OSEHRA's Synthetic Patient Data Open Source Project Group is proud to announce the release of their end-to-end open source patient data software package. Sponsored by Perspecta Inc., an OSEHRA Organizational Member, this group has worked for more than a year to make it possible for users to generate, visualize, and ingest synthetic patient data with a single command. "The lack of realistic clinical data that mimics the volume, velocity, and variety of real-world patient records has been an impediment to health IT development, testing, and simulation," said Bo Dagnall, chair of the Project Group and Chief Technologist and Strategist for Perspecta's Health Business Group. 

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Outages Hamper John Muir Electronic Health Record System

Joyce Tsai | San Jose Mercury News | September 9, 2014

John Muir Health experienced intermittent outages of its electronic health record systems Monday at both its Walnut Creek and Concord campuses, hospital officials confirmed.  The hospitals' electronic health record system began having problems around 11 a.m. and was "still off and on" as of 7:30 p.m. Monday, said John Muir spokesman Ben Drew, although the organization expected to have the system completely running again within a couple of hours...

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Overview of Open Source and VistA in the UK's NHS

There is much widely publicised interest from NHS England in encouraging the development and implementation of open-source software in the National Health System (NHS) with the debate raging in a number of forums, notably on EHI where this article and the comments it has generated are vital reading for anyone interested in this issue. This debate has been fueled by the availability of NHS England’s £260 million Technology Fund which is actively soliciting open source projects include bids to implement an NHS VistA... Read More »

Padgett Systems and Consulting

Padgett Systems and Consulting provides software and customization solutions for OpenEMR.  The owner, Jerry Padgett, has been developing for OpenEMR since 2012. Read More »

Pandemic Stresses National Need for Seamless Information Sharing Between Healthcare Providers, Black Book 2020 Interoperability Surveys

Press Release | Black Book Research | August 3, 2020

Two of three consumers revealed they will consider changing their physician and hospital providers in the coming year after learning how their health record was not shareable or available or was blocked in the past year...Five hundred and nine managers of frontline providers confirm the lack of general interoperability across the entire U.S. health care system has detracted from COVID-19 patient care, led to poor health outcomes and higher expenditures, and left population health data muddy and deficient...."Portability of data in the middle of this pandemic is vital," said Doug Brown, President of the survey organization Black Book Research. "But resolving systemic data blocking and platforms interfering with the exchange of patient data are not on the industry's front burner."

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