The Eclipse of open source health tools
Open Health Tools has announced its Health Interoperability Framework, a common effort among governments, providers, and vendors to create a common healthcare IT platform (PDF).
UPDATE: I have an exclusive interview with the head of the OHT, Skip McGaughey, on the ZDNet Open Source blog.
OHT aims to become the Eclipse Foundation of health care. This is evidenced by the fact that Skip McGaughey, the first chair of the Eclipse board of stewards, is heading up the effort.
The board chosen in November includes representatives from IBM, Oracle and Red Hat. It must be noted, however, that many key medical IT vendors, including Cerner, McKesson, Siemens and Microsoft, are not yet members.
While the Veterans Administration is a member of the group Medsphere, the commercial vendor of its VistA software, is not.
How the OHT group will work, technically, with HIMSS’ own interoperability council, which we profiled in February, is unclear.
The OHT code effort is also brand new. The forge is built on an OpenCollabNet platform — CollabNet is a member of the group. The first project released is an XML forms engine, under an Eclipse license. The Eclipse license, like other BSD-type licenses, allows commercial development of shared code.
