Tri-Continental Foundation of Experts to Collaborate on Global Health IT Solutions.Open Health Tools Offers Common Health Interoperability Framework for Improvements in Patient Quality of Care, Safety and Access to Health Records ASHEVILLE, N.C. -- Open Health Tools (OHT OHT Ocular Hypertension OHT Ozark Highlands Trail OHT Overhead Hoist Transport (manufacturing) OHT Oregon Healthy Teens OHT Orthotopic Heart Transplant OHT One Handed Typing OHT Offshore Heavy Transport OHT Over Head Transmission ) today announced a collaborative effort between national health agencies, government-funded organizations and agencies, major healthcare providers, international standards organizations and companies from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. to develop common healthcare IT products and services. OHT's mission is to provide software tools and components that will accelerate the implementation of electronic health information interoperability platforms, which improve patient quality of care, safety and access to electronic health records (EHR (Electronic Health Records) Computerized medical records that bring patient care into the digital age and save time, money and lives. The push to adopt comprehensive electronic documentation between doctors' offices and hospital settings intensified after the RAND ). OHT, with unprecedented resources, existing technology and expertise, provides a global community that will focus on the requirements, design and development of these enabling tools and components. The results will be available under an open source agreement so anyone may utilize them to provision interoperable healthcare platforms that will link clinics, hospitals, pharmacies and other points of care to make the healthcare system more efficient. OHT's health interoperability framework will utilize standardized, open interfaces and a set of reusable software components that can be assembled into systems and products by health systems and vendors. Skip McGaughey, executive director of OHT, noted, "Advancements in medical procedures and patient care have changed the way the world views health and wellness. However, modern healthcare information technology has not kept pace with the complexity of today's healthcare systems. There is a critical need for interoperability between healthcare systems and the consistent and seamless exchange of accurate data." Research points to a potential annual savings of $77.8 billion in the United States alone from the introduction of healthcare information exchange and interoperability.1 OHT is open to membership from any organization, subject to board approval. OHT's governance, legal and intellectual property policies, development processes, and marketing and business practices are based on the Eclipse Foundation The Eclipse Foundation leads the development of Eclipse, the open-source Java application platform and IDE. History In 2003–2004 the Eclipse Consortium, an unofficial consortium of software industry vendors led by IBM, founded The Eclipse Foundation, a model. The results of member efforts are being made available under a commercially-friendly open source license. It is the objective of OHT that any individual, organization or hospital can build applications using the Foundation's framework whether or not the entity is a member--free of charge. OHT Inaugural Members OHT is a collaborative organization comprised of the following standards organizations, academia, national health systems, the open source community, vendors and IT professionals: Government agencies in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia striving to provide healthcare professionals with rapid access to accurate and complete patient information, enabling better decisions about treatment and diagnosis: Canada Health Infoway Canada Health Infoway is a strategic investor working with Canadian jurisdictions to accelerate the development of electronic health records. According to their website, it is an independent, not-for-profit organization whose Members are Canada's 14 federal, provincial and , Inc., National e-Health Transition Authority (Australia), National Health Service, Connecting for Health (United Kingdom) and Veterans Health Administration (United States). Health standards agencies providing open, neutral, international standards for the effort: Health Level 7, Healthcare Services Specification Project Overview The Healthcare Services Specification Project (HSSP) is a standards development effort to create health industry service oriented architecture (SOA) standards supportive of the health care market sector. , International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation, Object Management Group. Academia and research: Linkoping University, Oregon State University Oregon State University, at Corvallis; land-grant and state supported; coeducational; chartered 1858 as Corvallis College, opened 1865. In 1868 it was designated Oregon's land-grant agricultural college and was taken over completely by the state in 1885. , Open Source Lab and Mohawk College Mohawk College of Applied Arts and Technology is a public college in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Mohawk also has campuses located in Brantford and Stoney Creek, as well as the Institute for Applied Health Sciences located at McMaster University. . Vendors and open source organizations providing compelling medical software, services and equipment solutions: B2 International, BT, CollabNet, Eclipse, IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) , Innoopract, Inpriva, JP Systems, Kestral, NexJ Systems, Ocean Informatics, Oracle, Ozmosis, Palamida and Red Hat. The technical goal of OHT is to assemble and/or develop a comprehensive, harmonized tool suite to enable the definition, development and deployment of interoperable EHRs. The complexity of both modern IT platforms and the healthcare domain means that first-class tools are an absolute necessity. Many of the founding members have entrusted key interoperability projects to be developed as Charter Projects under the OHT umbrella. The scope of the Charter Projects is intended to fulfill the technical goal of OHT to cover the lifecycle of EHRs in the broadest sense, including the development of standards, architectures, documentation and training, legacy systems, and so on. OHT technology will provide a platform with standard open interfaces together with reusable software components that can be assembled into patient-centered services and applications. First Charter Project As a condition of membership, individual organizations will take the lead on different components and will make major contributions of software and resources. For example, the NHS NHS abbr. National Health Service NHS (in Britain) National Health Service has contributed an XML XML in full Extensible Markup Language. Markup language developed to be a simplified and more structural version of SGML. It incorporates features of HTML (e.g., hypertext linking), but is designed to overcome some of HTML's limitations. processing engine and associated personnel and is leading the Health Level Seven (HL7) tools development project. HL7 is one of several American National Standards Institute See ANSI. (body, standard) American National Standards Institute - (ANSI) The private, non-profit organisation (501(c)3) responsible for approving US standards in many areas, including computers and communications. ANSI is a member of ISO. (ANSI (American National Standards Institute, New York, www.ansi.org) A membership organization founded in 1918 that coordinates the development of U.S. voluntary national standards in both the private and public sectors. It is the U.S. member body to ISO and IEC. )-accredited Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) operating in the healthcare arena. HL7's domain is clinical and administrative data. About Open Health Tools Open Health Tools is an open source community with a vision of enabling a ubiquitous ecosystem where members of the Health and IT professions can collaborate to build interoperable systems that enable patients and their professional healthcare providers to have access to vital and reliable medical information at the time and place it is needed. Open Health Tools is a trademark of Open Health Tools Inc. All other trademarks used in this document are the property of their respective owners. [1] Jan Walker, Eric Pan, Douglas Johnston, Julia Adler-Milstein, David W. Bates Bates , Katherine Lee 1859-1929. American educator and writer best known for her poem "America the Beautiful," written in 1893 and revised in 1904 and 1911. and Blackford Middleton, The Value of Healthcare Information Exchange and Interoperability Health Affairs, 19 January 2005, (http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/hlthaff.w5.10/DC1) The URL URL in full Uniform Resource Locator Address of a resource on the Internet. The resource can be any type of file stored on a server, such as a Web page, a text file, a graphics file, or an application program. for this announcement is located at: www.openhealthtools.org/news.htm |
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