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Open Health Tools Announces New Open Source Project

SANTA CLARA, CA (Dec. 11, 2008) – Today, at its fourth-quarter board meeting, the Open Health Tools (OHT) Foundation approved a new project in principle for the development of server-based technology designed to create interoperability among disparate health information systems.

This technology is required to build standards-based Health Information Exchanges (HIEs). The project is expected to dramatically drive down the cost of interoperability components which have contributed to significant cost barriers for the HIEs in their development of standards-based solutions.

Led by Misys Open Source Solutions, a division of Misys plc, the company will work within the open source community to build server-side components for the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) profiles. The first deliverable will address the IHE profiles for patient identifier cross-referencing (PIX) and patient demographics query (PDQ). The plan calls for an operable beta version in February 2009.

Studies have indicated that a Nationwide Health Information Network is expected to reduce the cost of healthcare delivery by nearly $80 billion annually .

IHE is an initiative by healthcare professionals and industry leaders to improve the way computer systems in the healthcare field share information. It promotes the coordinated use of established standards such as DICOM and HL7 to address specific clinical needs in support of optimal patient care. Systems developed in accordance with IHE standards are better able to communicate with one another and empower care providers to use information more effectively. Currently, IHE profiles are being used in the development of the Nationwide Health Information Network, which has demonstrated interoperability between several Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs).

Jonah Frohlich, California HealthCare Foundation’s senior program officer commented on CHCF’s dedicated support of this project by stating: “CHCF is dedicated to the promotion of open source development and is heartened that our code contributions will be able to improve the delivery of healthcare worldwide.”

On Aug. 11, 2008, Open Health Tools (OHT) announced it had accepted a donation from CHCF of key software components from a $10 million health information exchange project. CHCF provided the software’s code to OHT to promote its open source platform and to accelerate the establishment of regional health information organizations, a critical but often missing piece of the health care delivery system.

CHCF is already catching the attention of significant open source supporters, and is supporting an upgrade and integration of the Care Data Exchange code to make it more robust and usable. The intent is to create sophisticated patient matching algorithms that will work with the new OHT project to create an open source, enterprise master person index (eMPI). An eMPI is required by any organization that intends to exchange or aggregate patient information among systems that do not share a unique patient identifier, i.e. a medical record number.

Open Health Tools CEO Skip McGaughey (previously the co-founder of Eclipse) stated, “Open source is all about collaboration and is increasingly being recognized as the currency in the new economy. This project is all about meeting an industry need and promoting standards that are needed to solve complex interoperability problems in healthcare. We are pleased that the community has chosen OHT to assist in this collaboration.”

Tim Elwell, Misys Vice President of Open Source Solutions for Healthcare concluded, “Misys is putting its money where its mouth is by dedicating key worldwide resources to contribute code and work on this project. We are so confident of its success that we have committed to demonstrating the project at the 2009 February Connectathon to be held in Chicago. After we complete this project, we hope to encourage the community to begin the creation of IHE Registries and Repositories and other server-based components that the industry needs.”