Coders meet, greet, pry open Connect gateway

At the Department of Health and Human Service’s first-ever “code-a-thon” today, software programmers hunkered down to  mash up software code for “Connect,” a set of open source tools for exchanging health information over the budding nationwide health information network.

The aim of the group of some 80 coders was to enhance Connect so that more organizations – federal, state, and commercial – can begin using it as a pipe for expanding health information sharing across disparate host systems.

They also wanted to fix typical software issues like error messages in the software Their ultimate goal, however, is health data liberation, said one the program’s hosts, Federal Health Architecture program director Vish Sankaran.

“We want to make health information exchange a commodity and get data moving for the patient as soon as possible,” he said. Once that happens, data becomes usable, valuable and developers can start to innovate.

“Free the data,” Sankaran said. “The patient is waiting.”

Some of the participants have been working with a version of open source Connect that HHS dropped into the public domain in April, some have participated in online forums about the software gateway, while others were new to Connect and wanted to get involved.

To do so, they worked together for hours today in small groups on the top floor of HHS overlooking Washington, D.C.’s federal district. Many were meeting in person for the first time.

One group wrestled with how to make Connect more portable across competing operating systems in order to great a neutral path forward for Connect. If code is generated on one system, it should be usable elsewhere, said Jeff Schmitz, senior software engineer at Object Computing. “We want to find different ways to deploy and test Connect,” he said.

The group around the table tested some suggested code changes against the source code. If the group reaches a consensus on the new code, it can ultimately become part of a repository of code revisions, Schmitz said.

Sankaran said he expects more code-a-thons will follow on a quarterly basis and in a variety of locations around the country. It is the first code-a-thon at a federal agency that he is aware of, he said. 

Although the group gathered to discuss and even fix some technical issues, the meeting was more about building an active open source community around Connect, according to  Brian Behlendorf, a member of the White House Open Government team and now open collaboration adviser for the Connect program.

“Until now, we have had a small group of people that touch the [Connect] code,” he said in remarks welcoming the participants. “This is about the conversation that will lead to changes in code and improvements in, say documents of user stories, an issue tracker and eventually a repository,” he said.

Craig Miller, a contractor who is Connect’s chief architect, said, “we’re equally committed that Connect be useful to as many organizations as possible. This is the conduit for it.”