The VA has launched the Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA) to serve as the central governing body of a new open source EHR community. The VA has contributed its current EHR known as VistA to seed the effort.
OSEHRA will oversee the community of EHR users, developers, and service providers that will deploy and use the EHR software. OSEHRA is putting in place the framework and tools needed to enable the public sector, private industry, and academia collaborate to advance EHR technology.
The Informatics Application Group (tiag) located in Reston Virginia was awarded the design of OSEHRA under a contract awarded by the VA in June 2011. The tiag group currently provides services emphasizing clinical applications, knowledge management, enterprise services management, mobile development technologies and operation, and information architecture.
Seong K. Mun, PhD of Virginia Tech will serve as the acting Senior Program Coordinator of the CA. Kitware and The Washington University Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology will provide open source software management expertise to provide technical support. The CA will use state-of-the-art social networking tools as developed by the Clymer Group, a D.C based public-private partnership consulting service company.
Individuals and organizations interested in participating in OSEHRA at http://www.osehra.org/ are invited to join through the community website. Draft documents describing key framework components such as the design of its code repository and the definition of its software quality certification process are available on the website. Community feedback is welcome as the OSEHRA team finalizes the designs in preparation of the launch of full technical operations this fall.
