Informatics Delivering Better Healthcare Outcomes
Open Health Informatics brings together Open Standards, Open Source Software, Open Systems Interfaces and Open Development Practices with the aim of delivering better healthcare outcomes.
Open Health Informatics
Open Standards
Effective clinical information systems require the use of open standards at two levels — standards specific to healthcare and more general standards that allow healthcare systems to participate as fully signed up citizens of the connected digital world.
Open Source Software
Using interchangeable, best of breed open source components has two main benefits for healthcare systems. Firstly, it breaks, once and for all, the undue influence of a single technology supplier. Secondly, it means that healthcare systems can use general open source software, not just open source designed specifically to meet healthcare requirements.
Open Systems Interfaces
Ideally, every representation of data in a system, and every system function, should be accessible through an open interface, so that any external system that processes the data, or relies on any of the functions, can be updated or replaced independently. If not, then many of the benefits of using open source and open standards may be lost.
Open Development Practices
Open development processes, as embodied by agile methodologies such as Scrum, can deliver more than just software products. They can deliver solutions on time and within budget, through a true partnership between customer and supplier.
Resources
Access research outputs from over ten years of research on Open Health Informatics – papers,presentations and open source software.
Workshops and GOSEHR Summit
Our workshops on deployment of open source, model-driven Electronic Health Records are run at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
The annual summit meeting for the Global Open Source Electronic Health Records (GOSEHR) initiative is held in Oxford each Spring.