The Aurion Project, an evolution of the Federal Health Architecture’s CONNECT open source project focused on achieving health IT interoperability using nationally recognized standards, is off to an ambitious start. Its inaugural Aurion Community Town Hall Meeting was held April 12 to begin its chartering and membership process. Meanwhile, the Aurion 4.0 software is set for release May 3.

The Aurion Project was chartered by the Alembic Foundation. "We already have a vibrant group of volunteers advancing the software and adding new functionality," said Dave Riley, president of the Alembic Foundation. "We're also excited about how the community will evolve over the next few months."

Federal agencies, hospital organizations, health information exchanges, software developers, service providers and integrators participated in the town hall meeting. "The interest in the community is starting off at a great pace," said Vanessa Manchester, COO of the Alembic Foundation. "People do see that this is something that can benefit all the organizations out there."

At the town hall meeting a number of issues were discussed. Membership through website registration was established. There was widespread consensus to create a board of governors of up to 15 members, with governors overseeing technical, administrative and business areas. The community membership will elect the board, Riley said. "One of the board members would be a staff member of the Alembic Foundation to maintain an umbilical cord to the organization," he said. The town hall meeting also covered software development governance, which will be adopted from the Apache Software Foundation.

A draft of the Aurion Community Charter is open for comment until May 3. A second town hall meeting is scheduled for May 5 to present the draft charter to the community, Manchester said. The charter will be presented to the board of directors later in May and a meeting set up for the charter’s vote by the community soon after. Once the charter is approved, Riley said a product roadmap will be created to target future work projects and member commitment.

"It is part of our vision to continue to foster open processes that are transparent, community-based that produce these kinds of open solutions that people can take and adopt and use and modify as they need to for their particular situation," said Riley.

"Part of the value add that we bring to the table as a community is some of these things are complex and take experienced programmers to implement. If we can work together to get these implementations and make them freely available so that people have them as an option, then we can speed the uptake of that,” Riley said. “We’ll keep a close eye on national-level standards. That will have immediate value to those who are adopting those standards for health information exchange."