About

The Open Healthcare Group

The Open Healthcare Group is devoted to the promotion and distribution of an open-source health record and the open standards it depends on. Our early work on XML health records and metadata, beginning in the late 1990s, fed into later standards such as FHIR and the XML representation of DICOM. JSON has since become the interoperable data format, and the one the new AI systems speak, so we have redirected our standards work toward JSON Schema and are building Chart, an AI assistant for clinical documentation and coding.

Since 2026 the site also carries policy proposals. The connection is direct: the same demand for a clear, defensible, inspectable framework that we have applied to medical records applies to how American healthcare is paid for.

Jonathan A. Borden, MD

Jonathan Borden is a neurosurgeon in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the founder of the Open Healthcare Group. He developed the Borden classification of dural arteriovenous fistulas at Tufts-New England Medical Center, where he was an assistant professor of neurosurgery from 1995 to 2002 and directed the Boston Gamma Knife Center. His research has ranged from computational models of neurochemical networks and the organization of chromosomes in brain tissue to repairing degenerated intervertebral discs with growth factors, stem cells and minimally invasive techniques.

In healthcare informatics he co-edited the Resource Directory Description Language (RDDL) with Tim Bray, authored the XMTP specification, served as an invited expert to the W3C Web Ontology Working Group, and has worked on the standardization of XML-based electronic medical records.

Clinical papers and talks

Contact

jonathan@openhealth.org

The source for this site is on GitHub. Corrections are welcome as issues or pull requests.

Sites