Open Source Gets Its Day

I wrote a story for this week's Modern Healthcare magazine about the Alembic Foundation, which is assuming a caretaker role in the future development of the government-founded Connect Gateway project. The Federal Health Architecture program—overseen by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology—started the project in 2008.

I asked Dr. Robert Kolodner, former ONC head and Veterans Administration informaticist, about why open-source technology appears, finally, to be gaining some traction in health IT circles.

Kolodner said open source is in vogue because "right now, the government is more open to it." For example, he said, the ONC also is coordinating the Direct Project, another open-source software and standards package for peer-to-peer communications. "You're seeing it not just in healthcare," Kolodner said.

For example, the Defense Department outside of the healthcare system is using open source to develop software systems, he said. And although open source's application in healthcare previously was relegated to infrastructure, such as with Web servers, it's now "getting closer to the end users," he said.