Open Health Tools

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Open Health Tools (OHT) is a US-based entity organized as an IRC 501(c)6[1] non-profit trade association. Founded in November 2007, Open Health Tools is an open source software community with a vision of enabling an ecosystem where members of the Healthcare, IT, Government and Standards Setting professions can collaborate to develop interoperable systems that enable patients and their care providers to have access to vital and reliable medical information at the time and place it is needed. [1]

Open Health Tools is a community of open source developers and contributers, standards bodies, health professionals and government healthcare IT policy entities organized within a membership ecosystem to create a common health IT interoperability framework, open source software development tools, reference implementations and exemplary applications to support health information interoperability. The software development process used by Open Health Tools has been developed to ensure compliance with open source rules of engagement - meritocracy, transparency and open participation.

The technical goal of Open Health Tools is to assemble and/or develop a comprehensive harmonized software developer tool suite to enable developers and other stakeholders to define, develop and deploy interoperable Electronic Health Records (EHRs). The complexity of both modern IT platforms and the healthcare domain means that first class software tools are an absolute necessity.

The "products" of Open Health Tools are defined and managed as Charter Projects each with a member Sponsor, an OHT Committer and volunteers who write and test the proposed code. Charter Projects are projects whose charter is approved by the OHT Board of Stewards, and whose scope is intended to fulfill the technical goal of Open Health Tools. Charter Projects cover the life cycle of EHRs in the broadest sense including the development of relevant IT and coded medical terminology standards, software and system architectures, documentation and training, legacy systems integration, etc.

The Open Health Tools software framework and tools are available under a commercially-friendly open source license so that anyone (any company, any hospital, whether or not they are a member) can freely build applications for any purpose using the framework – without any payment required for the software. And, by using the Open Health Tools framework, they can insure standards-based interoperability with other products built based on the framework.

Leading members of Open Health Tools include, but are not limited to: Eclipse, Health Level 7 (HL7), IBM, International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization (IHTSDO), Misys, Australian National E-Health Transition Authority Limited (NEHTA), U.K. Department of Health's NHS Connecting for Health, Object Management Group (OMG), Oracle, Red Hat and the U.S. Veterans Health Administration.

Submitted by Dan Sears

  1. (PDF link) IRS Publication: Exempt Organizations-Technical Instruction Program for FY 2003 - IRC 501(c)(6) Organizations. http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopick03.pdf