We are pleased to update the openEHR community on the outcome of our EtherCIS international camp held over 3 days in London, December 2018.

A group of 12 individuals, representing 8 nationalities from academia, commercial and non-profit sectors came together to explore, discuss and plan the growth of EtherCIS and the open source openEHR community via an EtherCIS MkII plan. See here for the related roadmap that was agreed by the group as the way forward.

We are grateful for the help and support of Tom Beale (Ars Semantica & openEHR Foundation) who is now leading an EtherCIS MkII subgroup, working to coordinate this effort towards the public open release of EtherCIS MkII within the next few months.

More information on EtherCIS is available at  http://ethercis.org/ , https://github.com/ethercis and https://gitter.im/Ripple-Foundation/EtherCIS

We welcome interest and involvement from any others who wish to get more involved in this important effort. If you are interested in becoming involved please contact us at info@ripple.foundation

Dr Tony Shannon

It was a great pleasure to meet the Health Secretary on his recent visit to Leeds after launching his new “tech vision” for the health service. I met Matt Hancock MP at the ODI in the centre of Leeds on Friday 19 October 2018 and talked him through our development for Helm – an open platform solution for a person held record.

I was able to share with him the UI/UX experience of Helm as it looks right now and was pleased to hear very positive responses both from the Health Secretary and his Chief Technology Advisor, Hadley Beeman.  Helm has been in development for a number of months to ensure that we’ve got strong foundations for people accessing and contributing to their own health and wellbeing information. It has involved passionate work from a number of highly experienced technical people as well as clinically direction from Dr Tony Shannon, along with strong creative development from Simon Gamester.

 

Helm benefits from a number of innovative technologies supported by Ripple Foundation, namely, PulseTile, QEWD.js and EtherCIS and is underpinned by the internationally leading open standard for healthcare,  openEHR.  It also conforms to the well received paper “Defining an Open Platform” by Apperta Foundation.  

The exciting journey of Helm being tested by people in Leeds starts very shortly.  People are at the heart of this product and they will now lead the way in its future development.  Users of Helm will be able to tell us what works and what doesn’t, what would be useful, what is missing and Ripple Foundation is very excited to be a large part of this new innovation with the city of Leeds, led by Leeds City Council.  The plans for Helm are for rapid expansion into the Yorkshire and Humber region. We will keep posting news on the Ripple Foundation website but do get in touch if you would like to understand more about our open platform approach for addressing some of the issues faced by Health IT.  

Thank you to ODI Leeds for supplying the photos taken during the session with the Health Secretary.

By Phil Barrett

Director

Ripple Foundation

 

The world of healthcare can now begin to leverage the power and potential of the EtherCIS Clinical Data Repository. EtherCIS development has been supported by the non profit Ripple Foundation and this leading technology now provides the key foundation of its “showcase stack” and work towards an open platform in healthcare.  EtherCIS development is led by Christian Chevalley of ADOC Software Development and the EtherCIS technology is now the leading open source implementation of the openEHR standard in action (including AQL support). The openEHR standard has been adopted and implemented across healthcare systems throughout the world, representing the future of health IT.

Christian Chevalley of ADOC Software Development said, “EtherCIS being open sourced is not accidental, it is organically inherited from its fundamental components and philosophy. It is based on the open standard openEHR that specifies an open, vendor neutral, patient centred clinical data handling and knowledge engineering. Its implementation has been feasible due to the remarkable progress of the open source database PostgreSQL supporting the combination of relational and document typed data efficiently. Most of EtherCIS components have been derived from open source building bricks: service architecture, object oriented database querying, data serialisation, Web communication etc. As such, it is the result of the contributions of hundreds of analysts and developers.

Christian continued to say, “Open Source entitles anybody to have access to the source code, uses and copies the software and contributes to it; it is technically extremely convenient, however to promote successfully EtherCIS into the highly competitive Healthcare IT arena, it had to be free as in Libre. As a free and open software platform, it gives the freedom to anyone to create copy and run a clinical applications that is respectful of the fundamental right to store, query and interchange medical information without being tied to a specific vendor, proprietary encoding or physical location.

“Ripple Foundation has been instrumental to make this achievable; it has not only provided the necessary means to achieve EtherCIS development, but has also stimulated the collaboration, contributions and reviews by clinicians and IT peers, internationally. The result is a solid and relevant IT platform that is now naturally and logically fully integrated into the Ripple Foundation, supporting the adoption of an open health and care platform. The mission and values that Ripple Foundation is abiding by firmly sits with my own views, so I’m thrilled that EtherCIS is now officially part of the Ripple Foundation family.”

Dr Tony Shannon, Director of Ripple Foundation said, “We are honoured to be supporting EtherCIS as a key element of the Ripple Foundation’s open platform showcase stack.  We know to improve health IT we need data, information and knowledge to support the complex and highly pressurised health and care system.  EtherCIS ensures that information and data can be accessed, stored and exchanged securely because it a world leading open source example of the vendor-neutral & technology-neutral openEHR standard in action, developed and tested in the context of a highly usable clinical application. EtherCIS is a Clinical Data Repository fit for 21st Century Health and Care.”  

 

ENDS

Ripple Foundation is a community interest company that is supporting the adoption of an open health and care platform.  It is a clinically led team that working with communities to support using an integrated digital care platform for today and the future. Open source, open standards and underpinned by an open architecture that can be used worldwide.

Ripple Foundation is supporting and promoting the #1percent open digital platform challenge fund that is hoped will stimulate and support both the creation and adoption of an open digital ecosystem for the nation.

EtherCIS Clinical Data Respository. More info available at  ethercis/

openEHR: openEHR Foundation. More info available at http://www.openehr.org/

AQL: Archetype Query Language. More info available at
http://www.openehr.org/releases/QUERY/latest/docs/AQL/AQL.html

For media enquiries about Ripple, please contact info@ripple.foundation or visit the website for more information www.ripple.foundation

For technical enquiries about EtherCIS, please contact ethercis@ripple.foundation.

 

Ripple Foundation’s showcase stack encompassing three open source elements – front end UX/UI framework, middleware and backend/data repository.  Each component harnesses the power of open source and aims to demonstrate open standards in action to show that there is a different way to provide technology to our care professionals and patients.

Ripple Foundation was established in 2016 to support the adoption of an open health and care platform internationally.  As part of its mission, the team has supported the development of a leading edge UX/UI framework which they’ve recently launched called PulseTile. The clinically led team has also been reviewing complementary products and components that meet the increasing demands of the modern day health and care system.  They are proud to support and promote the incredible versatility of both the middleware – JSON API oriented QewdJS framework led by Rob Tweed of MGateway Ltd, plus the openEHR compliant backend of EtherCIS led by Christian Chevalley of ADOC Software Development.   

Dr Tony Shannon, Director of Ripple Foundation said, “We are promoting Ripple Foundation’s showcase stack to demonstrate how health IT can be done in the complex and highly pressurised health and care system.  For years care professionals have had to put up with inadequate, antiquated clinical systems and we believe this showcase stack shows what can be applied to any health and care setting to help provide a better solution for both the clinical requirements but also the business needs of health and care technology.  Information and data that you can access, store and exchange securely is an option if you adopt an open source, open standards underpinned by open architecture approach.

“I’m calling out to the health and care community to take a look at our showcase stack and have a play with what’s now openly available to reuse.  At Ripple Foundation we are here to support you and can answer any questions you may have and help to move health IT into the 21st Century.  

Tony continued, “We are also appealing for an open digital platform challenge fund that we have called #1percentfund.  Diverting 1% of available healthcare IT funds to an open digital challenge fund we believe could improve the care of 99% of the population by stimulating and supporting both the creation and adoption of an open digital ecosystem internationally.  We hope this Open Platform Challenge Fund could help any interested clinical and technical leaders out there to implement a different approach to issues we are facing.”

It is clear that Health IT is not good enough to support 21st Century care, Ripple Foundation believe their showcase stack components, used separately or in combination will help to meet the needs of clinical systems that are easy to use but also communicate and interoperate using open source and open standards.

The showcase stack can be explored from the Ripple Foundation website, including full “showcase stack” documentation.