Rob Tweed rtweed@mgateway.com
26 June 2019, M/Gateway Developments Ltd http://www.mgateway.com
Twitter: @rtweed
The QEWD HIT Platform is a set of modular QEWD Containers that interoperate as a demonstrator for Healthcare IT integration, and which provide the basic building blocks for an operational system.
The HIT Platform is based around some important standard building blocks:
- OpenID Connect (OIDC) for user authentication (cf NHS Login)
- OpenEHR for clinical information
- FHIR for demographic and other non-clinical information
As such, these very much conform to the vision set out by NHSX.
The platform consists of a set of QEWD Containers, each of which plays a specific role:
- an OIDC Provider which can emulate NHS Login, and which also provides user authentication for the demonstration and configuration/maintenance applications that are included with the Platform
- an Orchestrator service that provides the externally-facing interface to the suite of applications and MicroServices
- a set of MicroServices:
- an OIDC Client which is responsible for interfacing with the OIDC Provider
- a simple FHIR-based Master Patient Index (MPI) which maintains and serves up patient demographic information
- an OpenEHR Interface service which greatly simplifies how to maintain and fetch data from OpenEHR
- an Audit service which keeps a log of all incoming requests received by the Orchestrator.
In the QEWD HIT Platform Github Repository, you'll see the files for each of these Containers in their own specific folders as follows:
- main: the Orchestrator Container
- oidc-provider: the OIDC Provider Container
- oidc-client: the OIDC Client MicroService Container
- fhir-mpi: the FHIR-based MPI MicroService Container
- openehr-ms: the OpenEHR Interface MicroService Container
- audit-ms: the Audit MicroService Container
The key idea of the QEWD HIT Platform is to remove much of the normal learning curve associated with OpenEHR, allowing you to build applications around OpenEHR quickly and simply, but in a way that can be scaled to enterprise production levels.
See the presentation slides for further background and rationale behind the QEWD HIT Platform.
As stated above, the primary aim of the QEWD HIT Platform is to provide a simple, easy-to-understand and easy-to-use interface to OpenEHR systems, and therefore reduce the otherwise significant learning curve for which OpenEHR systems are renowned.
The QEWD HIT Platform can integrate with any OpenEHR system.
If you already have access to an OpenEHR system, then you can install and configure the QEWD HIT Platform to interface with it.
If you want to set up your own OpenEHR server to use with the QEWD HIT Platform, the simplest approach is to use one of the available Dockerised versions of EtherCIS. These usually actually consist of two Docker Containers, one of which provides the REST front-end, whilst the other provides the Postgres Database that EtherCIS uses for data storage.
You can try this one which implements the latest EtherCIS version 1.3. It's best to install them in the sequence below. Detailed installation/configuration instructions are provided in each of the Github repositories:
Once these are up and running, you can install and configure the QEWD HIT Platform.
The QEWD HIT Platform focuses on the creation, reading and updating of instances of a patient's Clinical Headings (eg Allergies, Procedures, Medications, etc), represented in an OpenEHR system by Templates.
It turns out that these interfacing operations (create, read, update) primarily involve the transformation of one JSON format into another (eg FHIR JSON format to/from the JSON format used by OpenEHR).
A key feature of the QEWD HIT Platform is that these transformations are performed in a declarative way, rather than programmatically, using a transformation template which is, itself, a JSON document.
A key goal of the QEWD HIT Platform is to create, as a result of this declarative JSON transformation approach, a straightforward, scalable solution that does not require specific programming skills, to create a set of definitive transformation template documents that can be jointly developed, agreed and shared across the NHS (and beyond), therefore avoiding the otherwise all too common reinvention of the same wheels.
This aspect of the QEWD HIT Platform is therefore important to understand, and is documented in detail here
The QEWD HIT Platform includes 4 browser-based applications: three for maintenance, configuration and monitoring of the Platform, and one that demonstrates a simple user interface around the core MPI and OpenEHR APIs:
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demo application: a simple browser-based application that demonstrates the core HIT Platform's MPI and OpenEHR APIs
-
openehr-maint: A browser-based (React) application that allows you to populate and maintain clinical heading data in your OpenEHR system
-
oidc-provider-admin: A browser-based (React) application that allows you to maintain the configuration and user database of your OIDC Provider
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qewd-monitor-ms: A browser-based (React) application that allows you to monitor and control the QEWD environment of each of your QEWD HIT Platform MicroServices.
Note: all four applications use the OIDC Provider for user authentication.
Installing, configuring, running and using the QEWD HIT Platform is described in the following documentation: