By David Riley, March 21, 2011

Welcome to the first Alembic Foundation community project: the Aurion Project.

The Aurion Project is a healthcare sector project focused on the use of open source technologies to achieve secure interoperable exchange of PHI (Personal Health Information). If this sounds familiar to you, it should!

The Federal Health Architecture (FHA) and the federal agencies initiated a project in 2007 to participate in the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) Cooperative trial implementations and for developing production quality software for use in their operational environments. That project was called CONNECT.

Within a year of starting CONNECT, the federal partners made the software available under the new BSD license to attract the private sector and to grow a community-based ecosystem around CONNECT. This was accomplished in April, 2009. Since that time the CONNECT community has grown from a few federal agencies, to over 2,000 organizations.

Between April 2009 and now, there has been a lot of discussion about how to finish transitioning the project to a full-fledged, community-based project. Brian Behlendorf was brought in as an open source consultant to help formulate a strategy and an incremental approach was pursued. At that time, the program decided that the best long-term approach for CONNECT was to create a private-sector foundation to ultimately move the project out into the private sector to increase the project’s scope, input and impact. FHA had served the important role of creating the seed for the market, and now it’s time to let the project truly grow.

Vanessa Manchester and I have dedicated the past three years to growing the CONNECT project within the federal community, and we decided that now was the time to launch the foundation. Our background with the CONNECT project, combined with the support from colleagues we’ve worked with for years, led us to the conclusion that the market is ripe for the introduction of a foundation that can truly combine the strengths of the public and private sectors to achieve greater good for the citizens we serve. Given the focus of the Alembic Foundation on transformation through disruptive innovation, and the Obama administration’s focus on transforming healthcare, it is appropriate that CONNECT becomes our first community project.

We have decided to rename CONNECT to the Aurion Project, and the solution will be called Aurion. We have assumed the CONNECT code base, and the first release of software will be Aurion 3.1, which is the same as the CONNECT 3.1 release that occurred at the end of September. New build environments and code repositories have been set up and can be accessed through the Aurion Project pages. Please see those pages for access to the project history, past releases, design documents, documentation, issue tracker, svn repository, backlog, etc.

Please bear with us during this transition as we rebuild the project and all of the support structures for a community-based project. We hope to be up and running shortly, and we’ll be able to move the ball down the field again as we have in the past.

We will be emailing the contact list to verify your continued interest in the project. If you want to stay involved in the project, please confirm your interest.

Finally, have you done anything innovative, disruptive or transformative today? If not, get involved on this project, there is plenty to be done and we could sure use your help.