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Technology Glossary

Plain-English definitions of the cloud, DevOps, AI and security terms we use — no jargon for jargon's sake.

CI/CD
Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery — automated pipelines that build, test and release software safely and repeatedly.
IaC
Infrastructure as Code — provisioning and managing infrastructure through version-controlled definitions (e.g. Terraform) instead of manual clicks.
FinOps
A practice combining finance and engineering to give cloud spending accountability, forecasting and continuous cost optimization.
SLO / SLA
Service Level Objective / Agreement — measurable reliability targets, and the commitments made against them.
Zero Trust
A security model that trusts nothing by default and verifies every request, regardless of network location.
RAG
Retrieval-Augmented Generation — grounding a large language model in your own data so answers are accurate and citable.
VAPT
Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing — finding and validating security weaknesses before attackers do.
HL7 / FHIR
Healthcare interoperability standards for exchanging clinical and administrative data between systems.
Mirth Connect
The most widely used open-source healthcare integration engine (now the community Open Integration Engine) — it routes, transforms and monitors HL7, FHIR, EDI and CCDA messages between systems.
SMART on FHIR
A framework that layers OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect security and app-launch onto FHIR, letting apps securely access EHR data with scoped permissions.
US Core / USCDI
US Core is the FHIR implementation guide that constrains resources to meet USCDI — the standardised set of health data classes mandated under the 21st Century Cures Act.
CCDA
Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture — an HL7 XML standard for exchanging clinical documents such as care summaries between healthcare systems and HIEs.
HIE
Health Information Exchange — a network that lets healthcare organisations securely share patient records across different systems and providers.
IHE
Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise — a set of interoperability profiles (XDS, PIX/PDQ, XCA, ATNA) that standardise how healthcare systems and HIEs exchange documents and identity.
OpenEMR
The leading open-source electronic health record (EHR) and practice-management system — self-hostable, customisable and free of licence lock-in.
Observability
The ability to understand a system's internal state from its outputs — metrics, logs and traces.
ISMS
Information Security Management System — the policies, controls and processes at the heart of ISO 27001.

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