IBM has donated code to the Eclipse.org foundation’s Open Healthcare Framework (OHF), which works on increasing interoperability of healthcare software so that software vendors to easily develop applications that exchange data reliably and securely.
The OHF aims to deliver an open source data sharing platform based on standards such as HL7 and Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE).
Joseph Jasinski, program director for healthcare and life Sciences at IBM Research, told E-Health Insider that IBM would benefit from contributing to the project as it would help to increase integration of software across the industry and because IBM would be able to build upon the code in the project.
"What we are focused on in our work is healthcare information system interoperability; allowing any application to get plugged into service orientated architecture," said Jasinski.
"One of the biggest challenges in creating a national interoperable electronic healthcare information infrastructure is the ability to access disparate health records stored in proprietary medical IT systems," he added.
"By making the clientside components of our Health Information Exchange (HIE) technology available through OHR, we hope to help solve this problem by providing an easy and affordable was for individual software vendors to connect their applications to a HIE, where disparate medical data can be accessed and integrated as if stored in a single repository."
Eclipse.org was created as a non-profit foundation in 2004, and IBM along with Borland, Red Hat and many other industry leaders were involved from the beginning. Its general aim is to encourage development of integration platforms for a large selection of industries through plug-ins.
Leader of the Eclipse OHR project, Grahame Grieve, said: "The availability of a lightweight, open source framework will allow EHR vendors and other open source HER 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."
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