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

 

Developments in recent months have brought the leading work of QEWD.js to even greater heights. Three key areas bring the technology led by Rob Tweed of M/Gateway Ltd bang up to date in the refactoring of the Ripple-QEWD solution:

Shift towards a microservices based architecture

Leveraging the power of JSON Web Tokens (JWT) to secure the technology

The Dockerisation of the solution to enable ease of install for this powerful technology

QEWD.js is a lightweight yet very powerful open source technology. The recent improvements make it even more appealing and central to Ripple Foundation’s open platform adoption mission.

For more information about QEWD.js and the QEWD-Ripple microservices infrastructure please check out these links:

http://qewdjs.com/

https://github.com/RippleOSI/Ripple-QEWD-Microservices

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.