I’m meeting today with a man who has consulted for the health care industry for many moons. We’re meeting in Old Town Rock Hill. This Electronic Health Records initiative is really taking off. I’m just happy that Open Source technology is the order of the day, and that Old Town Rock Hill is becoming a hub for Open Sourcerers.

Check out OpenEHR.org for an interesting open source technology that has recently hit the airwaves.

From the horses mouth:

“openEHR provides many advantages for health information system and application vendors. Because it is a standardised computing platform it enables many vendors to avoid re-inventing their own back-end for EHR, demographics, data integration and so on, and instead use one of the high-quality implementations becoming available. All of the API and service specifications are already or will soon be publicly available.

“A prime source of efficiency when using the openEHR platform is the ability to use archetypes agreed formally elsewhere, ensuring genuine semantic interoperability of health records. This might be considered a form of cooperative clinical configuration. While such configuration is a source of income to vendors in the current environment, it is a waste for the health system as a whole and a source of many of the integration problems we are currently experiencing.”