Friday, 11 August 2006

IBM Donates Code to Eclipse Foundation Health Project

IBM has announced that it is contributing software technology that supports the exchange of healthcare information to the open source community. The software, contributed to the Eclipse Foundation's Open Healthcare Framework (OHF) project, provides a mechanism to connect isolated ‘islands’ of information that today reside throughout the healthcare system to any Health Information Exchange (HIE).

Through the donated software the community would be able to build applications that can aggregate and sift through this information to improve healthcare delivery and research while protecting individual privacy. Any Independent Software Vendor (ISV) will be able to use the tools in OHF to connect their applications to any standards-based infrastructure, including IBM's HIE.

"By making the client side components of our HIE technology available through OHF, we hope to help solve this problem by providing an easy and affordable way for ISVs to connect their applications to any HIE, where medical data can be accessed and integrated as if stored in a single repository. As a result of this patient-centric systems approach, clinicians will be able to access health records from virtually any medical IT system, regardless of where the information resides," said Dan Pelino, general manager, IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences Industry.

"The availability of a lightweight, open source framework will allow eHealth Record (eHR) vendors and other open source eHR efforts to build and test standards-based solutions for interoperability, enabling small and medium clinics and hospitals to participate in the market with large healthcare enterprises," said Grahame Grieve, project leader, Eclipse OHF project.