Red Hat is pleased to announce that we’re joining the Open Health Tools (OHT) open source community. OHT is working closely with a broad spectrum of healthcare groups, including: major national healthcare providers in areas such as Canada, Australia and the UK; healthcare standards groups like IHTSDO and HL7; healthcare policy groups such as HSSP; and software providers such as Red Hat. OHT’s ultimate goal is to collaboratively build software tooling that will enable the seamless electronic exchange of healthcare data. This is an ambitious goal, but with incremental steps, we think it can be achieved.

The first OHT project is the HL7 tooling project, which will take some of today’s HL7 tooling to the next level.

We are tremendously excited about the potential enhancements that open source can provide to the healthcare industry. Semantic interoperability is a huge challenge, and we believe the only way that we can achieve this goal is through a collaborative, open source development model that brings together all stakeholders.