Our Story
OpenHIE is a global, open-source collaboration initiative emerging to assist in the strengthening of national health information exchanges for the underserved. We are a group of diverse organizations and people that are working to meet the aspirational goal of improving health through the better use of information.
This OpenHIE initiative emerged from the Health Informatics Public Private Partnership (HIPPP) initiative funded by the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The partnership was started to support development of the Rwanda Health Enterprise Architecture (RHEA) Project, a shared electronic medical record created for expectant mothers visiting antenatal clinics in the Rwamagana district, which later expanded to support all the other areas of primary and secondary care. As the benefits of the RHEA implementation became apparent interest gathered from other countries looking to grow their own health information technologies.
Our community assembled to bring together community processes, broad reaching experience, and a series of re-usable technologies to give countries a framework in which they can start to address their own health information needs and make an impact in their own local community.
Our Principles
OpenHIE operates according to principles of openness, transparency and sharing of ideas, software and strategies for deployment and use. Our approach is founded on the principle that those who use the health information must aid in the development of their information systems.
We believe it’s important to design highly adaptable processes and technologies to respond to rapidly changing health information needs in complex healthcare environments. We collaborate closely with resident health experts and open-source healthcare developers to sustainably build technologies, infrastructure, and human resources to meet local health information needs.
We appreciate that different constituencies come at work in different ways. OpenHIE and our local partners benefit from this wide range of valuable talent and experience. Our community processes encourage constituents to contribute to the process in ways that make sense to them. Working transparently within our community and with local partners allows different organizations to contribute.
Mission:
Our mission is to improve the health of the underserved through the open, collaborative development and support of country driven, large scale health information sharing architectures.
Vision:
We envision a world where all countries are empowered to pragmatically implement sustainable health information sharing architectures that measurably improve health outcomes.
Values:
- We are open, honest, and actively transparent in both our processes and our development.
- We believe in the power of community, as the best ideas come from people with different backgrounds and talents
- We believe that creating a safe place to raise concerns, discuss failures, improve existing ideas, and solve problems allows us to harness the collective wisdom of our community.
- We participate in developing open health information standards, and work to make them useful within resource-constrained environments.
- We believe it’s important to publicly document and share our knowledge, skills, experiences, and failures.
- We respond to specific country and stakeholder demands, not our imagination.
- We design highly adaptable processes and technologies to work in the most challenging environments.