Ivan Oprencak, Extreme Blue, IBM Almaden Research
(Extreme Blue is IBM's highly successful internship program for young researchers. This summer several EB teams, including Ivan's, focused on healthcare information technology challenges.)
Two of the companies distribute open source electronic medical record (EMR) applications (PossibilityForge, SynSeer), the others provide proprietary health record solutions (Blueware, WellLogic, CapMed). I noticed these key benefits while helping few of the vendors to integrate Eclipse OHF components into their products:
First, anyone can acquire the software for free. This saved the companies time and money by cutting development effort, a saving that will be passed onto healthcare providers.
Second, Eclipse OHF implements healthcare industry standards to exchange patient health information. The implementation undergoes rigorous testing at the IHE Connectathon where it must prove interoperability among different healthcare applications. This resulted in a higher product quality for the vendors, and ultimately their customers.
Third, healthcare applications are built atop of different development platforms: .Net, Java, and PHP. By levering service oriented architecture (SOA) the Eclipse OHF Bridge allowed interoperability between the various products. Developers used the web services API to search for patients, access their health information, and decode their medical records. With Eclipse OHF enabled applications, healthcare providers interested in exchanging patient information no longer need to worry whether their IT systems are compatible.
Electronic health records are critical in making our healthcare system more efficient. I am pleased to see that IBM has taken an important step in advancing EMRs and open source healthcare.
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Posted by: health | November 02, 2006 at 01:23 AM