Open Health Tools accepts code donation

Open Health Tools (OHT) today announced it has accepted a code donation from the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) of key software components from a $10 million health information data exchange project.

The code donation will allow distributed online collaborative development of tools to enable the secure exchange of healthcare information.

The donation has been aided by CollabNet, who are supplying the development environment and Palamidia, who analysed the software for vulnerabilities.

CHCF, an independent body committed to improving California’s health care delivery and financing system, provided the open source-format software code to OHT, a community of information technology and health care participants.

The donation by CHCF is to help accelerate the establishment of regional health information exchanges, a critical but often missing piece of the health care delivery system.

Information about the Open Health Information Exchange project (openHIE) can be found at https://openhie.projects.openhealthtools.org/.

“CollabNet facilitated CHCF’s efforts and will support all future code donations to OHT. We are providing a world-class development platform and online community services to enable OHT’s members and distributed project teams to collaborate in an open and secure environment,” said Tony de la Lama, vice president of Corporate Strategy and Marketing at CollabNet.

La Lama added that the platform fitted the vision of a global Health Information Exchange System where health organizations across the world can collaborate, share code and jointly develop software and new technology standards.

Additional help came from open source software specialists Palamida, which conducted software composition analysis on the CHCF code base and provided a complete inventory of all open source and third-party projects and versions in use for identification of known vulnerabilities and intellectual property ownership.

"Open Health Tools is taking an important step towards expanding the use of open source in the health care market," said Mark Tolliver, Palamida CEO. "We’re proud to have been chosen by OHT to assure its community that its projects are enterprise-ready."

A March 2006 Forrester Research study commissioned on behalf of CHCF concluded: “Successful development of open source software for health care will require viable developer communities. Such communities, which share an interest in a particular type of software, are the engines that drive open source projects.”

CHCF originally supported development of the contributed software for the Santa Barbara County Care Data Exchange (SBCCDE), one of the nation’s first regional health information exchanges.

The SBCCDE ceased operations in 2006, but it spurred the federal government’s adoption of a plan to establish regional health information organizations (RHIOs) throughout the United States.