The Alembic Foundation has released the second version of its open-source health information exchange software to the public. Based on the CONNECT program developed for the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN), Aurion 4.1 contains bug "fixes," software updates, and new features designed to enhance scalability, performance and platform neutrality.
Volunteers from private companies and public agencies worked together in an open source community to improve Aurion. Among the leading contributors were representatives of Agilex Technologies, Harris Corp., Mirth Corp., and the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center.
New features and fixes to the system include:
- When fanning a Patient Discovery or Document Retrieve request out to multiple communities, Aurion now sends all of the requests out and then collects responses as they complete.
- Installation instructions for 64 bit source/binary on Windows and on Linux.
- An update to the Aurion database creation script, making it compatible with Oracle databases.
- Correction of a bug that prevented certain "notify" requests from being sent to the NHIN.
- Completion of research on what build tags from the original CONNECT build scripts are required to run the automated test suites.
According to Alembic, a nonprofit organization founded by two consultants to the CONNECT project, "Organizations implementing Aurion as a part of their health information exchange strategy gain the benefits of implementing nationally-recognized standards that enable data exchange with federal agencies as well as with numerous other health IT stakeholders."
The press release did not list any healthcare organizations that are currently using Aurion. However, at least one hospital has downloaded CONNECT and used it to build a healthcare information exchange.
To learn more:
- read the Aurion press release
- check out this article in Health Data Management