A 25-member international group of government agencies, standards organizations, universities and industry vendors has formed an open-source software development effort called Open Health Tools (OHT) to tackle the lack of interoperability between health care products and services.
Based on the Eclipse open-development platform, which has tools used worldwide by more than 4 million application developers and programmers, OHT’s Common Health Interoperability Framework is intended to be the basis for free software that will link existing health information technology systems and ensure new applications will be able to speak to one another.
The goal is to run the first demonstration of tools developed under the OHT banner by January or February 2009, said Skip McGaughey, executive director of OHT and founder of the Eclipse Foundation. Some technology can be already be downloaded at the group’s Web site.
An immediate advantage of OHT will be in bringing together segments of the health care field that rarely talk to one another, McGaughey said.
“People developing software don’t understand the complexities of health care, and the health care professionals don’t understand what it takes to produce that software,” he said. “It’s hard for them to understand each other, so [one major benefit of OHT] will be to bring them together in one room.”
Officials hope that the OHT framework will appeal to many application and service providers because it takes care of the infrastructure code that each vendor now has to write, McGaughey said, giving programmers time to concentrate on more lucrative, value-added features.
The first OHT project will be based on an Extensible Markup Language processing engine used by the United Kingdom's National Health Service. NHS will contribute that software, along with development personnel, for free as a condition of its charter membership in OHT.
Other government members of OHT include the U.S. Veterans Health Administration, Australia’s National e-Health Transition Authority and Canada Health Infoway.
Health standards organizations that have so far signed up as members include Health Level 7, the Healthcare Services Specification Project, the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation and the Object Management Group.
Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab, one of the two academic members along with Linkoping University, will provide a simulation tool that developers can use to make sure their products conform with OHT requirements before delivering them to certification bodies.
There are 15 founding industry members, including IBM, Oracle and Red Hat.
The goal is to grow OHT by eight new members each quarter, McGaughey said.
Government Health IT presents Rick Friedman, director of the division of state systems for the Center for Medicaid and State Operations with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in this recent eSeminar regarding how the federal Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services is partnering with state Medicaid and health and human services officials to bring Medicaid into the digital age. Paul McCloskey, Government Health IT editor, moderates.
