February 29, 2008 - Agfa HealthCare, InterComponentWare (ICW) and Sun Microsystems joined the Open eHealth Foundation, a system working to improve the open standards-based exchange of medical information by providing software components under an Open Source license.
Members of the Open eHealth Foundation may create an extended community-driven software development platform in hopes to accelerate the digitization of the healthcare industry. Members can also compile solutions from existing clinical and administrative standards, working to increase interoperability with a multiple third-party components and platforms.
The main goal of the foundation is to provide free, open source software components and reference implementations to help achieve a high degree of semantic interoperability in the global eHealth sector based on open standards, working with solutions already in use, instead of starting from the bottom up.
The healthcare oriented components will initially include services for patient consent management, virtual patient records, patient information management and services for a standardized users, roles and relations management. These service components will extend existing open source projects such as OpenESB, Glassfish, OpenSSO and Mural.
For more information: www.agfa.com, www.lifesensor.com, www.sun.com