About OpenFurther

OpenFurther is an informatics platform that supports federation and integration of data from heterogeneous and disparate data sources.

It has been deployed at the University of Utah (UU) as the Federated Utah Research and Translational Health e-Repository (FURTHeR) since August 2011 and is available for use by all U of U employees and students. OpenFurther is the free and open source community edition of FURTHeR.

OpenFurther links heterogeneous data types, including clinical, public health, biospecimen and patient-generated data; empowering researchers with the ability to assess feasibility of particular clinical research studies, export biomedical datasets for analysis, and create aggregate databases for comparative effectiveness research. With the ability to link unique individuals from these sources, OpenFurther is able to identify cohorts for clinical research.

It provides semantic and syntactic interoperability as it federates health information on-the-fly and in real-time and requires neither data extraction nor homogenization by data source partners, facilitating integration by retaining data in their native format and in their originating systems.

OpenFurther is built upon Maven, Spring, Hibernate, ServiceMix, and other open source frameworks that promote FURTHeR’s code reusability and interoperability.