Practice management, ehealth records management lead open source healthcare projects

By EgovAsia Editors | May 17, 2010

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A year of significant growth in the number of open source projects established to develop healthcare applications was led by practice management and electronic records management projects, according to an analysis by Black Duck Software, global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software.

Projects such as CARE2X, aimed at increasing integration and interoperability between multiple incompatible healthcare information systems within an institution, and OpenVista, the open-source version of VistA, top the list of active health care OSS projects in the Black Duck KnowledgeBase, which counts nearly 900 open source software (OSS) projects with a healthcare focus. The analysis shows a 13% growth in the number of projects, with a 38% growth in lines of code from 2009 numbers. Projected development costs for the projects -- which combined include over 124 million lines of code -- have grown to approximately $8 billion USD, up from 2009's estimate of $6B, representing 45,000 staff-years of development effort.

Black Duck also announced its membership in Open Health Tools (http://openhealthtools.org), an open source community creating an ecosystem of OSS developers and healthcare professionals dedicated to developing a health interoperability framework, including tools and reference applications. The Open Health Tools forge hosts Hitex, the Health Information Text Extraction system (https://hitex.projects.openhealthtools.org), one of the largest OSS health care projects tracked by Black Duck. Hitex, which is built on top of the GATE framework, provides analysis pipelines and modules to extract health information from clinical documents.

"The Open Health Tools community welcomes new member Black Duck Software," said Skip McGaughey, Executive Director, OpenHealthTools.org. "Black Duck's development tools address issues that create barriers to open source adoption. In combination with OHT community tools and reference applications, designed to promote interoperability in healthcare IT, Black Duck's support will increase the pace at which OHT projects evolve and are adopted by healthcare organizations."

"In addition to improving access to data and bringing innovation to healthcare IT, the top projects in the Black Duck analysis offer faster time-to-solution and cost-avoidance to an industry facing sweeping reform at the federal level," said Peter Vescuso, Executive Vice President, Black Duck Software. "The increased focus we see on interoperability as a project goal in healthcare reflects trends in the broader open source community, which supports the increasing role that open source projects can play in advancing the state of healthcare IT."