James Kaufman, Research Manager, Healthcare Information Infrastructure, IBM Research
Eishay Smith, Healthcare IT Researcher, IBM Research
There has been great interest in the creation of a national health information infrastructure to transform the healthcare industry, and create new models for the handling of medical information. It will improve the quality of healthcare nationally and help advance medicine as a science.
In addition to support for exchanging patient records, the national infrastructure must support the needs of individuals, labs, payors, and public health. Many new standards have been developed to facilitate the realization of such an infrastructure but these standards have not yet been universally implemented by healthcare I/T companies.
In order to lower the barriers for the standards implementation, the Eclipse Open Health Framework (OHF), an open source project sponsored by Eclipse.org, will make available implementations of key components required for interoperability. These components include the profiles for Cross Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS), Authentication and Security (both as defined by the IHE), The HL7 CDA document standard, messaging standards (HL7, WADO), and HL7 Common Terminology Service (CTS).
These components will be available (under the Eclipse open source license) in the form of Eclipse RCP plugins. OHF is an open framework for development of a wide range of healthcare applications. OHF plugins are intended to use also in non-Java environment (like LAMP and .NET) using Web Service interface provided by the OHF Bridge. Anyone can contribute or use the technologies OHF.
Open Source efforts like OHF will help application developers build standards based interoperability into their products (commercial or open source) with low incremental cost.
For more information please see the Eclipse Open Health Framework project page, blog and wiki.
IBM HealthNex Electronic Health Records Open Source Eclipse Open Health Frameworke
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