The Alembic Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the use of open technologies, announced the availability of Aurion 4.0, the first release of the open source health information exchange software based upon CONNECT from the Federal Health Architecture.
Aurion is an open source health information exchange platform that implements the Nationwide Health Information Network standard services and specifications. Aurion is the first project chartered through the Alembic Foundation. It builds upon Aurion's direct ancestor, the multi-award winning CONNECT program built by FHA, to enable the secure exchange of interoperable health information among diverse organizations using a wide variety of technologies.
Organizations implementing Aurion as a part of their health information exchange strategy are said to gain the benefits of implementing nationally-recognized standards that enable data exchange with federal agencies as well as with numerous other health IT stakeholders.
Aurion 4.0 was built by the Aurion open source community and incorporates code contributions from 19 people from five organizations. As stated in the release, major enhancements to the new Aurion 4.0 Open Source Health Information Exchange Software include support for multiple assigning authority as well as a continuation of the code refactoring that began for the CONNECT 3.1 software.
The company is of the opinion that large organizations with multiple locations and systems often require multiple identifiers to make sure information is routed as quickly as possible to the correct site and the right systems. Support for multiple assigning authorities makes this possible, said foundation authorities.
The new release of Aurion assures that SAML Attributes are not defaulted. Also, the release now incorporates the refactoring of the HIEM which provides a mechanism for publish and subscribe scenarios. Moreover, modifications are made to patient discovery orchestration where it if it receives a null message, it will create a valid HL7 201306 response and return it.
Also, now The Consumer Preferences Profile now runs in Aurion 4.0 which is believed to be an important component in ensuring an individual has control over what aspects of their records are shared and with whom.
Aurion 4.0 now includes some Eclipse integrated development environment files within the project which provides developers with the ability to use a popular development environment for building upon these Aurion projects.
As part of the first release cycle, the Alembic Foundation and the Aurion open source community needed to set up a robust development environment. Many developers are noted to have contributed their time and energy to build Aurion 4.0. The volunteer contributions were overseen by Les Westberg of Agilex Technologies and Jon Hoppesch of Harris Corporation.
"Despite having launched the Alembic Foundation only two months ago, we've been able to quickly set up the Aurion open source development environment and assemble a talented group of development volunteers," David Riley, president of the Alembic Foundation said in a press release.
"The Aurion platform used CONNECT 3.1 as its baseline, and with the release of Aurion 4.0, the Aurion open source community has addressed many of the issues identified in CONNECT 3.1. This has been a huge task, and it wouldn't have been possible without our volunteer community," Riley added.
Also, company’s statement highlighted on a upcoming Webinar to be held on May 18 in order to provide further detail about technical aspects of the release.
Jai C.S. is a contributing editor for HealthTechZone. To read more of Jai's articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Rich Steeves
