Many readers wrote in and a ZDnet article was written on news that a major code base for health information exchange has been donated to the Open Health Tools group: OAKLAND, CA-August 11, 2008- Open Health
Tools (OHT) today announced it has accepted a donation from the
California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) of key
software components from a $10 million health information data exchange
project. CHCF provided the open source-format software code to OHT, a
community of information technology and health care participants, to help
accelerate establishment of regional health information exchanges, a
critical but often missing piece of the health care delivery system.
Information about the Open Health Information Exchange project (openHIE) can
be found at https://openhie.projects.openhealthtools.org/. Complete press release after the break.OAKLAND, CA-August 11, 2008- Open Health
Tools (OHT) today announced it has accepted a donation from the
California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) of key
software components from a $10 million health information data exchange
project. CHCF provided the open source-format software code to OHT, a
community of information technology and health care participants, to help
accelerate establishment of regional health information exchanges, a
critical but often missing piece of the health care delivery system.
Information about the Open Health Information Exchange project (openHIE) can
be found at https://openhie.projects.openhealthtools.org/.
“CollabNet facilitated CHCF’s efforts and will
support all future code donations to OHT. We are providing a world-class
development platform and online community services to enable OHT’s members
and distributed project teams to collaborate in an open and secure
environment,” said Tony de la Lama, vice president of Corporate Strategy and
Marketing at CollabNet. “The CollabNet platform is a perfect fit for the
vision of a global Health Information Exchange System where health
organizations anywhere in the world are able to collaborate, share code and
jointly develop software and new technology standards.”
Palamida conducted software composition analysis
on the California HealthCare Foundation code base and provided a complete
inventory of all open source and third-party projects and versions in use
for identification of known vulnerabilities and intellectual property
ownership. “Open Health Tools is taking an important step towards expanding
the use of open source in the health care market,” said Mark Tolliver,
Palamida CEO. “We’re proud to have been chosen by OHT to assure its
community that its projects are enterprise-ready.”
According to a March 2006 commissioned study
conducted by Forrester
Consulting on behalf of CHCF: “Successful development of open source
software for health care will require viable developer communities. Such
communities, which share an interest in a particular type of software, are
the engines that drive open source projects.”
CHCF originally supported development of the contributed software for the
Santa Barbara County Care Data Exchange (SBCCDE), one of the nation’s first
regional health information exchanges. The SBCCDE ceased operations in 2006,
but it spurred the federal government’s adoption of a plan to establish
regional health information organizations (RHIOs) throughout the United
States. Jonah Frohlich, CHCF senior program officer explained, “Our
experience taught us that these exchanges can improve quality and access to
vital clinical information when and where it is needed. With the potential
for cost reduction, we hope that more clinics and practices in underserved
communities take advantage of open source products.”
CollabNet lowers the barrier of entry for global organizations to
collaborate, code share and co-develop software and technology standards.
CollabNet’s secure environment and software development platform allows
projects and project teams to ramp up in days rather than weeks.
About Open Health Tools
Open Heath Tools is a collaborative effort between national health agencies,
major healthcare providers, researchers, academics, international standards
bodies and companies from Australia, Canada, the United States, the United
Kingdom and Europe. Its goal is to develop common healthcare IT products and
services and provide software tools and components that accelerate the
implementation of electronic health information interoperability platforms,
thus improving patient quality of care, safety and access to electronic
health records (EHR).