Healthcare IT at present is simply not good enough and poor integration/interoperability is one of the key issues facing the sector, adversely
impacting clinicians at the frontline and impacting the care process.
QEWDjs is an open source web development and integration framework, grown out of work with the VistA Electronic Health Record
programme in the USA, supported by the non profit Ripple Foundation, England, that is promoting and supporting the adoption of an open
health and care platform to transform 21st Century health care. Designed with the complexity of healthcare in mind, it leverages key patterns in
healthcare to deliver an integration framework based on ubiquitous web technology (Javascript and NodeJS) and is aimed at being easy to use.
The Ripple Foundation wish to offer the open source QEWDjs derived QEWD-Ripple framework to the Global Goods Digital Health Initiative
on the basis that it offers a uniquely useful integration framework for healthcare, that could be the basis of an open online integration
commons/store framework that could support healthcare developers around the globe, and has specifically been developed to be;
Easy to implement and scale- QEWDjs leverages the language of the web, Javascript - can run on a Raspberry Pi
microcomputer, while being very capable of supporting the big integration challenges in healthcare across a secure federation
of organisations.
Adaptable to different countries and contexts - by leveraging the ubiquity of Javascript, and its vast international community,
along with the powerful Universal DB technology that powers key medical software today (“MultiDimensional Global Storage”)
QEWDjs is uniquely placed to simplify and support many healthcare integration challenges today.
Supports interoperability engine capability with other technologies via standard web based technologies (RESTful APIs,
Websockets) plus leverages the multitude of adaptors/connectors available on the world’s largest software registry known as
NPM
Open sourced, publicly and freely available online, under the leading Apache 2.0 license
While we understand and expect the Global Goods initiative could/should will offer a broad range of tools, given the critical role that
integration plays at the frontline of healthcare, we advocate that a simple, helpful, web development and integration framework to support
software developers at frontline of healthcare, such as QEWDjs, is needed to transform the global health sector, so we now wish to share the
open source QEWD-Ripple framework with the wider world as a Global Good. The primary outcome we seek is an integration framework in
healthcare that healthcare developers want to use. The secondary outcome we seek is a library of easily shareable library of interoperability
components that can be widely shared around the world.