PeSCA - Open Source Platform for eHealth

Acronym of the case:

PeSCA

Web address of the case:

http://redes.epesca.org/

Country of the case:

Spain

City/region:

AndalucÃa

Posting Date:

25 February 2010

Last Edited Date:

25 February 2010

Author:

MarÃa JesÃºs Rubia (FeSalud-eHealth foundation)

ehealth | ITC | Open source

Type of initiative

Network

Case Abstract

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are revolutionizing how healthcare systems deliver top-quality care to citizens. In this way, Open Source Software (OSS) has demonstrated to be an important strategy to spread the ICTs use. However, there are some barriers in adopting OSS in the health field: need for open standards, heterogeneous OSS developed without normalization and metrics, lack of initiatives to evaluate existing health OSS and needs for quality control and functional validation.

The goals of the PESCA project are to create an interoperable modules platform to evaluate, classify and validate good practices in health OSS. Furthermore, a normalization platform will provide interoperable solutions in the fields of the health-care services, health surveillance, health literature, health education, knowledge and research. Within thisÂ platform, the first goal to achieve is the setup of a collaborative work infrastructure. The platform is thought as a Social Network aiming at evaluating five main scopes of every existing open source tool for eHealth: Open Source Software, Quality, Pedagogical scope, Security and privacy and Internationalization.

Description of the case

Domain

eHealth

Topic

Health portals

Sector

Healthcare

Start date - End date

November 2007 (Ongoing)

Date operational

January 2008

Target Users

Health professionals

Target Users Description

The repository will be provided with multidisciplinary groups working worldwide to develop useful tools in Spanish that may be implemented and easily maintained through the Internet community. For this reason, a key step is to setup a collaborative infrastructure, made not only by technological but also by human resources.

Scope

International

Status

Operation

Language(s)

Spanish

Policy Context and Legal Framework

The Open Source Platform for eHealth (PeSCA) has been designed as a set of interoperable OSS modules and it is born as a platform to join efforts, open knowledge, tools and resources of governments, enterprises, health institutions and individuals with the aim of providing health care resources to communities. Its success is the result ofÂ the following specific objectives:

Setup of the collaborative work infrastructure;
Analysis and validation ofÂ existing open source tools for eHealth and selection of the most significant ones;
Support of the internationalization realized through the translation of validated software into three languages: Spanish, Portuguese and English;
Provide Workflow Management: elaborating agreements and regulations, development of the Master Project Plan, risk management, coordination of technical works, budget control for an effective financial management, facilitating the communication among partners, quality control;
Evaluation of the platform scalability for its local and regional implementation.

One of the main goals of the project is to collect a repository of OSS solutions. All the solutions included will be evaluated and validated under working conditions and following generally accepted criteria to accomplish with technical requirements (relevance, feasibility, interoperability, etc).

Project Size and Implementation

Type of initiative

Participation

Overall Implementation approach

Partnerships between administration and/or private sector and/or non-profit sector

Technology choice

Open source software

Funding source

Technology solution

The first step was to choose between creating an independent network or joining a public one. The data security requirements and the ability to customize and brand the network exactly the way the project needed were the key factors to create a specialized, targeted network.

The selected environment is called Elgg, an open source social networking platform developed for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). The main reasons for choosing Elgg over other similar platforms for the purpose of this project were its user-centered approach, as opposed to the more traditional presentation-based view employed by most of the other tools, as well asÂ the fact that it provides reasonable support for privacy control at a fairly granular level that other tools simply do not have. Furthermore, Elgg disposes of other features: Podcast support, Full access controls, Supports tagging, User profiles, Full RSS support, Rss aggregator, Create Communities, Collaborative community blogs, Create â€˜membersâ€™ networks, Import content, Publish to blog, Multilingual, Branding/customization, OpenID support and many more.

In November 2007, a version of Elgg was set up on http://redes.epesca.orgÂ to testÂ usability and other issues. During this period the chat tool was installed to provide interactivity to the platform. The final version was released in January 2008 and that was the launch of the PESCA Social Network.

The main page is the public area of the site, with the blog spots, the tag cloud, the browse link, the created communities and two search boxes. All members can use the same tools in their own space: Blog, Chat, File manager, Resources, memberâ€™s network and a profile editing tool.