Open Source Health Care: Black Duck joins OHT

Black Duck few days ago announced its membership in Open Health Tools (OHT),  an organization dedicated to open source health-care IT systems aiming at the creation of an open source eclipse-like ecosystem.

Peter Vescuso, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, told me more about this Black Duck initiative.

In the US, Healthcare reform is a strategic and vital initiative. Open Health Tools is working to provide health care patients and their care providers access to vital and reliable medical information at the time and place it is needed. Black Duck joined OHT to support and accelerate the work of the OHT ecosystem by offering its expertise to help reduce barriers to open source adoption and to accelerate development. For example, Black Duck maintains the industry’s most comprehensive KnowledgeBase of open source project information that includes over 900 projects specifically related to healthcare. We believe we can help by providing information and analysis on open source projects that are available to the healthcare industry. Black Duck evangelizes the use of open source, and membership in OHT is a strategic initiative in an area that can make a profound difference.

The critical need for open source health care, in Matt Asay’s words, maybe fullfilled by organizations like OHT, let’s see if IT vendors self-interests can provide the society with an health interoperability framework.