FHA Supports Open Source Governance and Code Management of CONNECT

The Federal Health Architecture (FHA) is working with Open Health Tools (OHT) to migrate the governance and code management of CONNECT, an open source software solution that enables secure health information exchange (HIE), to their open source community. OHT, a 501(c)(6) non-profit organization that governs open source communities and provides a framework for individuals, vendors, and government to collaborate on health IT projects, has selected CONNECT as one of their projects.

This is a key milestone for the CONNECT program that and the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with the open source community and FHA. FHA looks forward to supporting the community’s efforts, through OHT, to implement a governance structure that provides a mechanism for community participants– including health information exchanges, vendors, providers, and academia – to expand their contributions to the CONNECT program and have a meaningful voice in its future evolution. FHA will continue to contribute to the development of CONNECT to ensure that there are versions of this program that support the unique requirements of the federal health community.

FHA anticipates that CONNECT will continue to be a core component of the rapidly growing interoperability ecosystem, allowing organizations nationwide to support better, more cost effective care for all U.S. citizens.

CONNECT development began in 2007 as a federated program managed by FHA and its federal partners, including the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs, and Social Security Administration. Over the following seven years, CONNECT grew and evolved to meet nationwide requirements to enable secure, efficient HIE among the federal partners, states and private organizations. FHA engaged with members of the public and private communities to develop CONNECT, with the existing codebase including contributions from 15+ organizations.

CONNECT is distributed under the BSD 3-Clause (Modified BSD) License. See opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause for further license details.

As an open source capability, CONNECT is available to anyone to download and tailor to their unique needs. FHA encourages industry to join in the development of the CONNECT community and contribute to the evolution of CONNECT.

For more information about FHA, visit www.healthit.gov/fha or contact federal.health@hhs.gov. For more information about CONNECT, visit the CONNECT Community Wiki at wiki.connectopensource.org.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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