Vision

caution

Instant OpenHIE v1 has been discontinued in favour of Instant OpenHIE v2. Please see the Instant OpenHIE v2 docs for more details.

info

The Instant OpenHIE architecture, codebase, and documentation are under active development and are subject to change. While we encourage adoption and extension of the Instant OpenHIE framework, we do not consider this ready for production use at this stage.

Instant OpenHIE Goals

The Instant OpenHIE project aims to reduce the costs and skills required for software developers to deploy applications conforming to an OpenHIE architecture. This will enable quicker initial solution testing, demonstrations. It will also serve as a starting point for faster production implementation and customization.

Instant OpenHIE is a simple way for semi-technical persons to install and see a complex system working against a real-world use case. It will illustrate how interoperability can work to solve health challenges. It will also show how a national interoperability architecture could be created with open-source software and standards.

At maturity, Instant OpenHIE activities will provide portable, launchable versions of multiple OpenHIE components to facilitate:

1. Demonstrable reference products - those that align with the OpenHIE Community's vision for low resource contexts
2. Rapid software development of mediators and point-of-service systems by making it possible to launch several applications easily so the developer can focus on their task
3. Reproducible, version-controlled infrastructure for user-contributed tests of the OpenHIE Architecture profiles, workflows, and use cases.
4. Production-ready containers and orchestratable components that are deployable in any context.
5. Extensibility so that anyone may create Instant OpenHIE packages and plug them into the existing Instant OpenHIE functionality.

The first phase of activities addresses items 1-2. The second phase will cover production-ready deployments and infrastructure for testing. These features will be built incrementally upon the innovations and lessons learnt from the efforts of the earlier phase.

Deploying and managing private health information of patients and providers is among the most sensitive of any data. It is critical to ensure security and privacy, backups and data recovery, authentication, authorization and other enterprise standards.

At maturity, Instant OpenHIE would provide production-ready containers and some orchestration assets, such as Kubernetes manifests, but these would be borrowed from Instant OpenHIE. The system implementers will be responsible for databases, upgrades, privacy, security, backups and recovery, authentication, authorization, and other production-ready concerns.

Instant OpenHIE would be a way for implementers to develop their tooling around the OpenHIE Architecture and the versions of it, rather than as a substitute for enterprise HIS implementation, support and management.