Big Blue will contribute lines of code to the nonprofit Eclipse Foundation that is working on an Open Healthcare Framework project. This is an effort on Eclipse’s part to improve the levels of interoperability between the applications and systems within and across healthcare organizations.

The project is developing frameworks and tools to implement healthcare IT on open standards so all individual medical records will be automated in the next 10 years.

IBM’s software will help connect isolated islands of information that reside throughout the healthcare system to its own Health Information Exchange. In this way, developers in different healthcare organizations will be able to build different applications that will more easily connect to other healthcare applications.

“As a result, doctors will be able to access health records from virtually any medical IT system, regardless of where the information resides,” said Joe Jasinski, program director of healthcare and life sciences at IBM Research.

Mr. Jasinski said IBM decided to contribute lines of open-source code because it will enable software makers to provide low-cost solutions to primary care physicians who cannot afford proprietary software.

Low Adopter

“The healthcare industry is one of the lowest adopters of IT,” he said. “The advantage to that would be greater patient safety, fewer preventable errors, and reduction in cost.”

 This effort will benefit IBM because it promotes the use of more IBM software such as its web application server WebSphere on which its healthcare exchange is built.

“It reinforces our belief that open source is a very valuable software asset; it will open up the healthcare ecosystem to more IT investments,” Mr. Jasinski said.

Red Herring, Tuesday 8 August 2006