OSEHRA Open Adoption ModelPromoting an OSS VistA Healthcare Platform

Prepared for OSEHRA AWG by Edward Ost

04/19/2023

OSEHRA Conference – Stephen Warren

➜ “Proprietary Innovation versus OSS Innovation”➜ “More than just taking out but putting in”➜ “VA has a preference for working with open source

software solutions and open source communities”➜ “When that new contract [T4] is in place, it will have

an OSS requirement on it.”

Moving from OSS License to OSS Culture

➜ OSS license does not necessarily imply community driven

➜ How to promote and accelerate community driven ingest of code by the VA?

➜ Evolve from VA centric publishing to community driven development

Cathedral and Bazaar

Principles

➜ What is the scope of OSEHRA stakeholders?• VA infrastructure• Broader healthcare network(s) supporting veterans

➜ What is the scope of OSEHRA?• Platform• Product

➜ Community-driven versus a community of consumers?• Self-governed• Dependent on government

Community-Driven

➜ What structures encourage a culture of community?

➜ What structures are necessary to provide a path to active community participation in creating code?

➜ What structures enable collaboration between community members?

VistA Stewardship

➜ What role(s) should the VA have wrt VistA• Consumer• Contributor• Publisher• Steward

➜ Does the VA 800 lb gorilla skew the balance of the OSEHRA community?

➜ Where should the center-of-gravity of the community be, VA or OSEHRA?

➜ Should there be a change in scope or charter of OSEHRA wrt VA and VistA stewardship?

What can we learn from other OSS Communities?

➜ Apache

➜ OpenStack

➜ Linux

Open Adoption Model

➜ Open Reference Architecture➜ OSS Reference Implementation➜ API Management

➜ How can we apply this in a community-driven way to OSEHRA and VistA in a manner in which establishes an open market rather than a closed Cathedral.

Community Technical Enablers

➜ Standards based➜ Service oriented➜ Test Driven contracts➜ Devops infrastructure-as-code➜ Decentralized SCM (Github)

These enablers allows the community to collaborate technically todrive innovation from the bottom-up rather than the top-down

Provides a more scalable crowd-sourcing innovation model