Frectally speaking

As part of my work I’ve been advocating change in healthcare here for some time and have explained the elements needed as a blend of people + process + technology change.

Some time back I made the case that healthcare needed a mix of new technologies to support the change required, including a mix of open source and open standards based technologies.

Some time later I made the more explicit case for the open platform that we all await that will transform 21st Century Healthcare. In that case I identified 5 key elements of the platform required;

• Usability – healthcare needs great usability, poor Health UX has gone on too long
• Integration – the complexity of healthcare demands integration around the patient
• Clinical Kernel – there needs to be great fit between the process of care & the tech
• Code & Community – open source code – with community around it – is needed
• Governance & Leadership – this requires strong leadership and good governance

While waiting for others to emerge and lead on this challenge, it has been clear that I too should play my part. So following years of frontline clinical practice, clinical leadership roles and informatics effort…. many lessons learnt, from experiences ranging from the NHS National Programme for IT  to the more local Leeds Care Record , informed a focused push to begin the Ripple Open Source Initiative in 2015.

That has since evolved into the establishment of the Ripple Foundation, a non profit organisation supporting the move towards an open platform in healthcare, of which I am a Founder/Director.

Over the last 2 years, it just so happens that we have crafted most of the key components of the open platform that we believe healthcare requires. So as of the end of June 2017, the Ripple Foundation has now announced the launch of its Showcase Stack.

The Ripple Foundation Showcase Stack announcement & demonstrator is available here.

The key components include;

• PulseTile – Frontline UX/UI Framework
• QEWD – Quick Enterprise Web Development/Integration Framework
• EtherCIS – Enterprise Clinical Data Repository (inc openEHR support)
• All Open Sourced on Github under permissive Apache 2 license
• Leadership & Governance established by the Ripple Foundation

I’m very proud to have had the opportunity, support and the team around me to have been able to release these works to the world.
This announcement isn’t quite the end of a programme of work, more the beginning of a new phase…. a new open platform opportunity.

Our work is imperfect, flawed, with much room for improvement.
Yet it is an effort, an effort to make the world of healthcare a better place, for patients and professionals alike.

This Showcase Stack work of the Ripple Foundation and the components that make it up will either survive or thrive.
If it simply survives, a more capable set of open platform components/tools will emerge, make themselves known and go on to transform healthcare forever.
If they do thrive (and we hope they thrive) it will primarily be because these are helpful to others.

We hope they help.

Tony Shannon
30th June 2017