As many of you will know, following positive developments on the ground in Leeds, the Ripple Open Source Initiative began in 2015 and moved into the not for profit, Ripple Foundation shortly thereafter. In targeting and supporting the development of key open source components to address usability (PulseTile utilising Marmelab’s React-Admin framework), interoperability (Rob Tweed’s QEWD) and vendor neutral data persistence (Christian Chevalley’s EtherCIS), we have tackled some of the most difficult challenges in healthcare and shown how they can be addressed together, with tools that work.
Its gratifying to know that these tools from leaders in their fields have now been leveraged and are in use in projects in England, Finland, Germany, India , Scotland and more.. such is the power and potential of open source technology.
In Yorkshire, England, the open source Ripple stack has been key to the development of a Person Held Record for the Leeds and Yorkshire region, as well as key open source dimension to an integrating “system of systems” network to underpin that regions Yorkshire & Humber Care Record / NHS Local Health Care Record Exemplar (LHCRE) programme.
In Scotland, the open source Ripple stack has been central to their efforts to get up and running a National Digital Platform for the Scottish NHS. They started off their work with a series of sprints using the principles of user centred design, agile development and open source + platform technology to get their national plans underway.
In Germany, the HighMed consortium have taken a fork of one of the Ripple Stack tools , the openEHR compliant EtherCIS system and worked to improve it before recently giving it back to the open source community as EHRbase. This open source tool is aimed as being central to their Research & Development efforts across 14 partner organisations throughout Germany
In Finland, the national Una Core eHealth platform is also leveraging the open source openEHR tooling we have fostered to build the basis of their national integrated care record platform to serve the people of Finland.
In India, an innovative team has used the Ripple open source stack to build an information system to support the Ayurveda care system , know as AyushEHR.
We will look shortly at the challenges these initiatives face, each large regional/national efforts in their own right, for now at least as we close out 2019 we acknowledge these small stories as success stories and take a little pride in what we have started….
