Healthcare IT at present is simply not good enough and the challenge of building Guideline Based, Workflow Integration, Electronic Health
Records at scale is one of the grand challenges of our time. The current state of disconnected siloed proprietary healthIT systems is perhaps the
key issue facing the sector, adversely impacting clinicians at the frontline and impacting the care process.
EtherCIS is an open source Enterprise Grade Clinical Data Repository, built to comply with the leading international Electronic Health Record
standard known as openEHR. This world leading open source reference implementation of openEHR in action has been 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 aims to support the challenge of persisting structured clinical data to the
vendor and technology neutral openEHR standard, while also supporting unstructured data. In particular a key aim of the EtherCIS
development is to grow the international community that wish to work towards a vendor and technology neutral platform in healthcare.
bit.ly/openplf
The Ripple Foundation wish to offer the open source openEHR compliant EtherCIS framework to the Global Goods Digital Health Initiative on
the basis that it is the leading open source reference implementation of openEHR, internationally. The openEHR architectural standard for
Electronic Health Records offers Digital Square the world’s leading open standard for the specification and development of Electronic Health
Records that is vendor and technology neutral, as the essential basis for Guideline Based, Workflow Integrated, Digital Healthcare.
While we understand and expect the Global Goods initiative could/should will offer a broad range of tools, given the adverse impact that
diverse proprietary data formats have at the frontline of healthcare, we advocate that the world’s leading open standard for Electronic Health
Record development, i.e. openEHR is a key element needed in the transformation of the global health IT sector to a vendor and technology
neutral open platform, so we now wish to share EtherCIS with the wider world as a Global Good. The primary outcome we seek is the broader
adoption of an open EHR platform that bridges the current gap between clinical innovators and the health IT development community and the
wider health IT industry. The secondary outcome we seek is a library of easily shareable library of interoperable EHR components (ie openEHR
archetypes and templated) that can be widely shared around the world.