Potential for Open Source for Health IT Software Development

Open source development supports health IT software innovation as healthcare technology vendors and provider organizations work on improving the same source code. “Open source is a methodology on how to develop software,” Red Hat Director of Healthcare Craig Klein told HITInfrastructure.com. “The premise behind open source is you have a group of people collaborating on a particular piece of code. For example, if you have someone building an operating system, there may be one hundred thousand people contributing that particular piece of code from thousands of organizations.” The number of developers lends open source as an avenue for health IT innovation. Industry professionals are constantly improving on available source code and sharing their improvements with the open standards community. Open standards encourage competing implementations of the same standard, rather than creating competing platforms. This can benefit consumers, according to a report published by the Journal of Medical Internet Research.