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Open source software and the future of health IT: O’Reilly jumps in at its annual OSCon event

May 24, 2010 at 10:00 am Leave a comment

Kudos to Andy Oram of O’Reilly for organizing what promises to be a great introduction between the world of health IT and the open source software community. In his recent post , he summarizes his experience in building this first ever line-up of health IT software developers, vendors and regulators at the annual O’Reilly OsCon event.

As everybody knows, O’Reilly is highly respected technology publisher with deep roots in open source software. Its annual OsCon meeting is always well attended and, with the excitement this year around publication of meaningful use standards and HITECH stimulus money, this was an opportune time to get the open source community and software developers in general more directly engaged in building great products for health IT.

The health IT portion of the convention runs from Wednesday to Friday, 7/21/10 to 7/23 and the meeting is Portland, Oregon.

As a sample here is the first one-half of the lineup:

• overview of Open Source Healthcare Software
• officials from the the federal ONC (Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT) on “CONNECTing the Public and Private Sector Healthcare Communities”
• NHIN Direct: An Open Government Health IT Collaboration with Arlen Malec, its principal
• OpenEMR, an open-source GPL EMR
• Leveraging Open Source Software to Assure Privacy of Health Information
• Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) for managing health workers in low-resource countries
• DIY Genomics: an open platform for citizen science: “Biology is the next open source frontier”/li>

This is just the first day and a half !

If you are a developer and interested in health IT opportunities, this would seem like a great event ( registration ).

Entry filed under: news. Tags: EMR, HIT, open source.