Ask Barack Obama – healthcare is complicated. That’s one of the reasons Tolven, Inc., chose to use industry-standard technologies and data models in its software, and why it makes its software open source.
“We count on partners and community members to augment functional and technical areas that are meaningful to users,” says Steven Weiner, Tolven’s COO. “We welcome developers who have ideas about special areas of functionality and technology.”
Tolven develops three applications as part of its Tolven Health Record software. An electronic Personal Health Record solution (ePHR) is designed to enable consumers to record and selectively share healthcare information about themselves and their loved ones in a secure manner. An electronic Clinician Health Record solution (eCHR) will enable physicians and other healthcare providers to securely access healthcare information collated from any number of trusted sources relating to an individual patient. And a healthcare informatics platform provides the platform that enables the healthcare data to be stored and accessed via the ePHR and eCHR solutions. The software’s account structure enforces security and facilitates sharing information between clinicians, patients, and researchers.
According to Weiner, three aspects of Tolven software make it unique:
1. Our commitment to incorporating the healthcare informatics standards needed to achieve semantic interoperability.
2. The fact that our platform is equally useful for clinical care systems, personal health records, and clinician health records.
3. Our technology stack and architecture assure enterprise-class scalability and reliability at low hardware cost.
Weiner says the latest release highlights the software’s plugin framework, which makes partner applications easy to develop and implement. “Getting acquainted with our plugin framework may help [developers] see their ideas come alive.”
Development is ongoing, and Weiner says future versions will fill out the functionality needed for electronic records that seek certification from CCHIT and other certifying bodies evolving out of recent legislation. If you’d like to contribute to better healthcare records, Tolven welcomes your input.