About us

"This is too important to be this hard."

A lot of us feel that way about Healthcare Information Technology (HIT). We aren't setting out to solve all the problems that HIT evolution and adoption faces - but we do have our eyes on a few areas:

• There simply aren't enough people that really know their stuff. Exerts are in short-supply and we need to do better sharing our strongest teachers and subject matter experts (SMEs) - and we need to build/train new ones. These people need safe places for collaboration and peer support, and new people need to get ramped up faster and in greater numbers.
  
• Clarity in the standards/specifications matters. A lot. They provide the foundation for everything we're building on, and they need to be tight and more people need to really get them. We can't afford for product vendors to go off on their own and build systems that can't interoperate.
• Knowledge (and code, and sample systems, and techniques...) needs to be shared more quickly, we can't have everyone competing unnecessarily at this stage of the game.

What we are... and are not.

We ARE:

• A club. A consortium. An association. A mastermind group. A set of collaborative teams.
  
• A safe place to get peer review from other experts. 
• A place to get help with your career, to help find new opportunities, build knowledge,
• A place to get help on your project - specifically to hire an expert with the backing of other experts (gunslingers with a support system!).
  
• Trying to help improve a critical area that the world NEEDS. We are here to help.
  

We are NOT:

• Trying to be big and cover every single area of HealthIT. Nor are we trying to expand beyond HealthIT.
  
• Trying to build up unnecessary infrastructure, or displace existing organizations that do great work. Our goal is to push our work to the right standards organizations and communities for safe-keeping/integration - and we do NOT want to add to the existing problem of information segregation).  

All together, we are a combination of an association, a niche boutique consulting firm, a think-tank, and a PR/staffing agency for our members.

History

openHITgroup is a young organization, founded in 2012. Our informal roots came from ad-hoc support-system relationships and unofficial clubs joined amongst analysts/coders working on various HIT standards. We are a virtual organization with no headquarters or prestigious building, though we utilize swing/temporary space in Washington DC, Orlando FL, Austin TX, and Seattle WA.