TY - JOUR T1 - The Emerging Role of Open Source in Healthcare JF - Open Source Business Resource Y1 - 2008 A1 - Brian Barry AB - Healthcare has been characterized as a multi-trillion dollar cottage industry. It is highly fragmented, labour intensive, barely connected, extremely competitive, and has many different vendors and proprietary solutions. The rising cost of healthcare is straining budgets at all levels of government and imposing financial burdens on corporations and individuals alike. Against this backdrop, legitimate concerns about privacy have led to a plethora of regulations requiring complex administrative, physical and technical infrastructure to safeguard sensitive health information. Governments are attempting to impose standards and specifications from the top down to improve efficiency in healthcare delivery. These standards are broad, complex and, for the most part, lack implementations. In short, things are in a bit of a mess. A consensus is emerging around two initiatives that promise to improve the current situation. The first is to foster widespread adoption of Electronic Health Records. The second is to improve accessibility and interoperability between EHR systems. In this article, we present Open Health Tools, an open source ecosystem where members of the health and information technology professions can collaborate to build interoperable EHR systems. PB - Talent First Network CY - Ottawa UR - http://timreview.ca/article/203 IS - November 2008 U1 - Open Health Tools Brian Barry is CEO of Bedarra Research Labs and CTO of Open Health Tools. From 1991-2002 he served variously as Chief Scientist, CEO, President and CTO at Object Technology International, Inc. Under his leadership, OTI developed the Eclipse Platform and the IBM VisualAge family of products. Dr. Barry has published a number of research papers and articles on a wide variety of technical subjects. He has served on the Program Committees for software conferences such as OOPSLA, ECOOP, AOSD and Agile Development, was a co-author of the ANSI Smalltalk standard, and actively participates on research review boards and committees. ER -