With commercial software increasingly in favor in government, the nonprofit Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA), founded in 2011 to accelerate innovation in open source EHR software and related technology, will cease operations this week.
An ANSI-accredited Standards Developing Organization, OSEHRA (pronounced “Oh, Sarah”) hosted software repositories for managing applications such as VistA, Indian Health Service’s RMPS, Blue Button and others. It grew into a community with over 850 registered members representing more than 160 industry, academic, and government organizations.
The organization was founded by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The VA Office of Information & Technology (OI&T) was responsible for the development and maintenance of the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), VA’s electronic health record (EHR), until it announced the current ongoing switchover to Cerner. (The IHS is considering moving away from RPMS as well.)
Here is OSEHRA’s origin story in brief: By 2010, VA recognized that VistA’s rate of innovation and improvement had slowed substantially, and the codebase was unnecessarily isolated from private sector components, technology, and outcome-improving impact. To address those issues, VA established OSEHRA as the mechanism to open the aperture to broadly based public- and private-sector contributions.
In a note on the organization’s web site, CEO Seong K. Mun, Ph.D., wrote: “With a heavy heart, I am announcing that OSEHRA will cease operation at noon on Friday, February 14, 2020. I want to thank all the Members of the OSEHRA Community who have given their best to build an open source ecosystem for health IT. I am also very grateful to our staff, who have contributed heroic efforts to build a sustainable organization while leveraging community support. Finally, I thank the members of our Board of Directors, who volunteered their time and unflagging efforts to guide the community and advocate on our behalf.”
Mun’s biography on the web site described him as a professor of Radiology and Director of ISIS Center, at Georgetown University Medical Center until 2007 and as a pioneer in digital imaging, teleradiology, PACS, telemedicine, e-health, global disease surveillance, open source software and medical informatics.
The group’s mission statement on its web page said it would “be the hub of open source software efforts in the health information technology community." We will use the collective resources of the Alliance to drive innovation, and be an honest broker to the health information technology community. The open source Electronic Health Record code base established and maintained by the community will be continuously refreshed, modern and modular, and enable users to acquire competitive options for implementation, customization, training and services from multiple vendors while avoiding vendor lock-in.”
