There is an interesting new (to me) project called the Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework (OHF). Eclipse is a highly regarded Free and Open Source, cross-platform, Java-centric, Integrated Development Environment (IDE). According to the project proposal page the goal of OHF: ‘…is to extend the Eclipse Platform to create an open-source framework for building interoperable, extensible healthcare systems. We also intend to develop a complementary set of exemplary tools. OHF will enable software providers and integrators to cost-effectively create customized offerings for healthcare delivery organizations that comply with government regulations and industry standards.

The Open Healthcare Framework will develop infrastructure, tools, components, and services that will support development of both client and server applications. Client development will be based on RCP and server components will be based on J2EE together with core Eclipse concepts such as plug-in based extensibility…’

There’s more information from this healthnex article about where IBM wants to go with this: ‘…In order to lower the barriers for the standards implementation, the Eclipse Open Health Framework (OHF), an open source project sponsored by Eclipse.org, will make available implementations of key components required for interoperability. These components include the profiles for Cross Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS), Authentication and Security (both as defined by the IHE), The HL7 CDA document standard, messaging standards (HL7, WADO), and HL7 Common Terminology Service (CTS).

These components will be available (under the Eclipse open source license) in the form of Eclipse RCP plugins. OHF is an open framework for development of a wide range of healthcare applications. OHF plugins are intended to use also in non-Java environment (like LAMP and .NET) using Web Service interface provided by the OHF Bridge. Anyone can contribute or use the technologies OHF…’