Hello and welcome to our Digital Commons Academy, a set of open access videos, which you are free to use and and share with colleagues.

At Ripple Foundation we appreciate that digital advancement in health and care is complex so we’ve broken down the issues into a series of short but thorough videos for you to explore.  Our hope is that by watching the films on your own or as part of training within a team we can help to share our learning with you.

Each film is less than 5 minutes and covers a range of topics including clinical leadership, implementing change and the state of the current market place.  We hope that they provide you with information and raise discussions for you to debate as a team, board or organisation. Full list of videos is available here or on vimeo.

We are a non-profit making organisation that was established a few years ago to support the adoption of an open platform for health and care.  We believe that the future of digital health and care is not one single technology firm providing all the solutions but a vendor neutral market place where organisations large or small can compete fairly because they are developing solutions that meet a set of open standards in pursuit of an open platform.

We hope you enjoy the topics covered and please do get in touch with your feedback – we are always learning and developing at Ripple Foundation so we welcome your views.  

Ripple Foundation is delighted to announce we have been officially approved as a supplier for cloud support on the UK government framework called G-Cloud 10.  It is a national framework that shares the agreement between the government and suppliers who provide cloud-based services.

To be accepted onto G-Cloud framework we have provided information about the company and the way we work, we also added information about the services we offer.  

Phil Barrett, Director at Ripple Foundation said, “Our open source and open standards based work within Ripple Foundation is very well aligned to the GDS design standards so this is a natural fit for us. To be on the G-Cloud framework is an important step in the UK market by removing perceived barriers to procuring services and further realising our mission for the adoption of an open platform in health and care.  We support three open source technologies with our open standards based approach:

a leading edge UX/UI framework in both Angular.js and React.js – PulseTile.

incredible versatility Node.Js based middleware – QewdJS

plus the powerful openEHR compliant backend of EtherCIS

“We are looking forward to hearing from buyers within the public sector that would like to use our range of support services.” Click here to find out more Digital Marketplace G-Cloud 10 services 

For further information about the Ripple Foundation please contact info@ripple.foundation.

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.

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

We are proud to be supporting Yorkshire and Humber’s successful bid to become a Local Health and Care Record Exemplar with our technical solution for a Person Held Record called Helm. This is a credit to their national and international leadership in this field and a sign of a change in the health IT marketplace.  

The delivery of an open standards and open platform based person held record was originally supported by the city of Leeds thanks to the leadership of Dylan Roberts, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Leeds City Council, but will now be made available to the geographical footprint that makes up Yorkshire and Humber, involving over 70 organisations.  It is also being discussed in other Local Integrated Care Record Exemplar areas including Greater Manchester with Salford Royal GDE moving to explore the technology.

The benefits of supporting an open platform approach allows Helm to be built in such a way so that it will becomes accessible across geographies and care providers regardless of the clinical system in use.

Helm puts users in control of their own health and care data by allowing them to view and add to key information, starting with medical data and growing to include wider public services. For the first time, the public will be able to see and interact with their own records and data on an easy to use, secure, online platform that encourages them to take control of their own health and wellbeing.  Helm reflects this new position with a “Take Control, Take the Helm” strapline and call to action.

Dr Tony Shannon, Director at Ripple Foundation added, “Over the past few months we’ve noticed a real shift in emphasis within the Health IT sector towards adopting an open platform with open standards.  At Ripple Foundation we truly believe this is the only way to stop the mediocrity of an underperforming health IT sector. By building Helm on an open platform, in line with the international openEHR standard, we are working to support a transformative move to future proof healthcare IT systems.

Tony continued, “Ripple Foundation’s mission is to improve the care of patients and citizens alike by providing technology that supports their needs and delivers easy to use systems that are scalable and cost effective.”

Helm will adopt the Ripple Foundation’s showcase stack which can be broken into three levels:

PulseTile – leading edge UX/UI framework developed by Ripple Foundation

QewdJS  – versatile middleware led by Rob Tweed of MGateway Ltd

EtherCIS – powerful openEHR compliant backend/data repository led by Christian Chevalley of ADOC Software Development.   ****

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 into the health and care systems and ultimately to the users of Helm.

For further information about the Helm and open platform technology please contact info@ripple.foundation.

 

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.

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

EtherCIS Clinical Data Repository is developing at pace with radical new improvements in its latest V1.2 release including enhanced security, more complex querying, federation,  improved configuration capabilities and much more. EtherCIS is the leading open source implementation of the openEHR standard in action (including AQL support) and these new developments make the use of EtherCIS even more compelling in the marketplace.  

EtherCIS development is supported by the non profit Ripple Foundation and is a key component of their “showcase stack” and work towards an open platform in healthcare.  It is led by Christian Chevalley of ADOC Software Development who said, “We’re thrilled with the latest release of EtherCIS and proud that our work combines contributions by the community across the globe.  It is helping Health IT to become sustainable, open, vendor neutral and delivers patient centered clinical data handling with knowledge engineering.  Helping to deliver this message to key decision makers and leaders has been part of Ripple Foundation’s mission and we are excited to be part of the action.”

Dr Tony Shannon, Director of Ripple Foundation said, “We welcome the work that Christian and his company is continuing to deliver for EtherCIS, it’s a great achievement and really helps to ensure that open platforms are the future of Health IT.   We are also thankfully that cities like Leeds in Britain are implementing EtherCIS in their area for Helm, the adoption of an open platform Person Held Record.  EtherCIS is helping to contribute to the global endeavour of improving data quality, access, storage and research which is fit for 21st Century care.”

Below is some further information on the enhancements made or if you require an indepth understanding please visit Github at https://github.com/ethercis/ethercis .  

Enhanced Security

EtherCIS upgrade ensures sensitive data is further protected against eavesdropping and it controls access to the database, so users can only access the data they have been authorised to see.  

Enhanced openEHR querying (AQL)

Users can now perform more complex querying due to new enhancements using openEHR templates for meta data. The openEHR standard has been adopted and implemented across healthcare systems throughout the world, representing the future of health IT.

Federation

Improved federation which allows information retrieval technology to simultaneously search in multiple resources. This means that a user can make a single query request which is then distributed to the search engines, databases or other query engines participating in the federation.

More configuration capabilities

EtherCIS REST server now supports a full set of parameters for basic HTTP, SSL, low resource monitoring and request logging.

Under the hood improvements

There has been an upgrade to a number of critical components including REST server, DB programmatic interface and XML handling. EtherCIS libraries have been cleaned up and simplified to reduce dependency conflicts and many unit tests have been finalised

To find out more about Ripple Foundation please visit www.ripple.foundation

 

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.

EtherCIS Clinical Data Repository. 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.

 

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