Mohawk Dean launches new blog
A team of students, recent graduates and professors from Mohawk College's School of Engineering Technology has created a new toolkit that holds the promise of saving time and money when building electronic health record systems.
The team, working in Mohawk's Applied Research Centre in Health Informatics, has released a new eHealth software development toolkit called the Everest Framework. The toolkit is designed to help connect physicians' offices, pharmacies, laboratories and other health care providers to electronic health record systems being built by Canada's federal and provincial governments.
The Everest Framework is based on the pan-Canadian Standards released by Canada Health Infoway, a not-for-profit organization that collaborates with the provinces and territories, health care providers and technology solution providers to accelerate the use of electronic health records (EHRs) in Canada. Mohawk is working on an applied research project to build and test the first working prototype of Canada Health Infoway's Blueprint reference architecture for the pan-Canadian EHR. The system would replace tens of thousands of largely paper-based networks that currently process upwards of 2,000 health care transactions every minute in Canada.
"Mohawk College is proud to work with Canada Health Infoway and industry partners in laying the foundation for a national electronic health records system," says Cheryl Jensen, Vice President, Academic at Mohawk. "The software development toolkit created by our students, graduates and faculty is an innovation solution that will help save time and money in building Canada's eHealth system."
The Everest Framework features an advanced programmer's toolkit for HL7v3 messaging to dramatically reduce the time and expense of developing eHealth applications. Canada Health Infoway has adopted portions of the Everest Framework to create developer guides that will be used by programmers who are implementing pan-Canadian e-health messaging standards.
The development of the Everest Framework at Mohawk's Applied Research Centre in Health Informatics was supported by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) under the College and Community Innovation (CCI) Program and Canada Health Infoway.
The success of Mohawk's Applied Research Centre in Health Informatics speaks to the strength of Mohawk College, says Chief Innovation Officer Ted Scott. "Students apply what they learn in the classroom and come up with real-world solutions. With our applied research project in health informatics, a pretty remarkable team at Mohawk is working at the leading edge of innovation where health care and technology intersect."
The Everest Framework toolkit is available as open source software from the Everest support site and Open Health Tools.
Mohawk College of Applied Arts and Technology is the prime job creating engine in the Greater Hamilton Area, training 11,500 full-time students, 4,000 apprentices and 42,000 continuing education registrants from four campuses in Hamilton and Brantford, Ontario.
For more on the Everest Framework, contact Ted Scott, Mohawk's Chief Innovation Officer, at 905.575.1212 ext. 3309.