OpenVista Collaborative Product Roadmap
Join the 'Club' now!
Contributing to the Ecosystem means you are also contributing to quality, effective healthcare
Medsphere has created the OpenVista Collaborative Product Roadmap in response to market needs and requests. Designed to be used by customers, partners, the Healthcare Open Source Ecosystem, and the industry at large, its purpose is to help guide the community, facilitate collaborative opportunities and share the direction of community innovation, as together we work towards building a better open-source electronic health record solution.
The Roadmap is essentially the growth path of the Ecosystem and of course an eternal work in progress. Due to its collaborative nature, Medsphere cannot contractually commit to specific dates or deliverables related to components of the public Roadmap.
Use this public Roadmap to . . .
- (as a clinically or technically focused collaborator) explore and sign up for projects or suggest new ones
- (as a Medsphere customer, partner, or partner client) plan accordingly to either share resources or fund development efforts (based on ROI assessment)
- (as an entrepreneur or company executive) assess value-added opportunities to build on OpenVista and our new OVID platform
Click here to collaborate.
Medsphere's Software Development Process
As an open-source solution, OpenVista includes lines of software code regularly received from the VA and Healthcare Open Source Ecosystem contributors. This iterative process—a growth engine spinning off applications, support, business start-up platforms, etc.—is at the core of OpenVista's value proposition.
However, it is important to understand the controlled process by which Medsphere updates OpenVista to include these new lines of code. While our business model in terms of how we sell software (we don't, we sell services) differs from the proprietary vendors, our development model is very much the same.
No update, patch, fix or enhancement from the VA or Ecosystem is included in OpenVista without first going through a robust internal testing process.
Medsphere Quality Assurance follows a product development cycle process that incorporates reviews in each and every phase. The QA team works with our Product Management and Development teams to ensure that the architectural design, implementation design and actual code developed meet customer requirements.
The main QA approach for developing test plans is to simulate how end users will utilize the system. The QA team develops test scripts that readily discover defects and validate implemented changes against user requirements. As part of the certification process, a User Acceptance Testing phase is facilitated between customers and the services team. The resulting issues found in the field are mitigated by the development team and fixes validated by the QA team to create incremental builds released to the customer until successful User Acceptance Testing has been fully achieved.
Tales of the Ecosystem—Some Sample Contributions
CCR/CCD Gateway Project
CCR/CCD developer George Lilly has led the effort to connect VistA to the Electronic Primary Care Research Network (ePCRN) research network created at the University of Minnesota, and now to the Nationwide Health Information Network. Partly funded by the NIH, the CCR/CCD Gateway project includes collaborators from WorldVista, KRM, Sequence Managers, HP and Robert Morris University. Medsphere, another key collaborator, has introduced OVID, its Java-based OpenVista Interface Domain, to the project as a means of uploading CCRs into NHIN and other networks. Click here to find out more.
Patient Registration in the Middle East
Dell Perot's Michael Huneycutt, project lead on the government-sponsored Hakeem initiative in Jordan, also used the new OVID platform to build on OpenVista's patient registration features and contribute these code contributions back to the Ecosystem. Stay tuned for more on this project.
Behavioral Health
Silver Hill Hospital and other Medsphere customers have made significant contributions to OpenVista behavioral health content via the Ecosystem's Behavioral Health Working Group. Feel free to join in here.
Best Practices
Award-winning (and HIMSS Analytics Stage 6) Midland Memorial Hospital has made significant contributions to OpenVista templates and other content. As a result, other Medsphere customers are now able to go-live with the OpenVista EHR system even more quickly and cost-effectively using what Medsphere calls, for lack of a better term, its "factory-build" system. Enjoy the fruits of Midland's labor when you become an OpenVista subscriber.
iPhone/iPOD Touch Apps
Entrepreneur Hugo Troche used OVID to build an application that can integrate mobile healthcare devices, providing ubiquitous portable access to clinical information. He and his team of Silicon Valley developers released as open source the software code they used to connect applications to OpenVista; the Java-based connector uses RESTful Web services. Stay tuned for more on this project.