25/07-08   -   Press releases

Open Source for eHealth – making standards work: Open eHealth Foundation Defines Development Priorities

Open eHealth Foundation Now an Official Nonprofit Organization – Board of Directors and President Elected – Development Priorities Defined

The Open eHealth Foundation (OeHF), an open source initiative for the efficient exchange of medical information based on existing standards, is officially registered as a nonprofit organization in Delaware. This milestone enables the foundation (which was launched at HIMMS 2008 by Agfa HealthCare, InterComponentWare and Sun Microsystems) to begin operations.

Board of Directors and President Elected
As the OeHF’s first Chairman of the Board, the foundation members elected Lindsy Strait from Sun Microsystems. Additional board members include Thomas Liebscher, InterComponentWare, and Evgueni Loukipoudis, Agfa HealthCare. As Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Loukipoudis will be responsible for the architecture as well as the interoperability of software components developed by the OeHF.

Alexander Ihls was appointed OEHF’s President and also acts as Chief Business Development Officer (CBDO). In this function, he is directing the foundation’s orientation and is responsible for the acquisition of new partners and members. Richard Golden assumed the role of Chief Operating Officer (COO) for the foundation and will be responsible for setting up the infrastructure and the organization of development projects.

Development Priorities Defined
The OeHF will use existing IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) profiles as a guideline for its development activities. All the OeHF service components will be designed flexibly, will offer IHE compliant functionality, and will be usable in national initiatives such as the Canada Health Infoway or the Fraunhofer electronic case record in Germany.

The OeHF has prioritized the initial IHE profiles which will be given priority for being implemented as open source components. Initially, actors from the IHE PIX/PDQ profile (and related profiles) will be implemented. The development work for these components has already started. The results are scheduled to be presented at the HIMSS 2009 in Chicago to the general public.

Open Membership
The OeHF is open for additional members interested in participating in the community. Visit www.openehealth.org for additional information.

About Open eHealth Foundation
Open eHealth Foundation (OeHF), launched at HIMSS 08, uses existing open source projects for developing a platform on which its members and other providers can create open source components that are made available free of charge, including reference implementations to obtain high semantic interoperability based on open standards. Open eHealth Foundation will not develop any new interoperability standards, but teams up with the existing standardization organizations to implement already defined standards in its open source components, and to provide reference implementations for these standards.