Four health IT organizations committed to advancing interoperability are collaborating to create an open-source healthcare sandbox.
The Interoperability Institute (IOI) is joining forces with Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) USA, healthcare software company Interopion, and Red Hat, a company that provides open-source software products, to create InterOp.Community, which officials say is an emerging effort to advance the healthcare interoperability agenda via the use of open platforms and open-source software.
IOI presently supports Interoperability Land, a simulated healthcare testing environment in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. But the institute says it has increasingly realized the need to advance an open-source complement to that environment not only to engage and support the development community, but to convene stakeholders from across the health IT landscape interested in advancing health interoperability.
As such, Interop.Community is intended to be an industry convergence point and incubator, and IOI will both invest in that work and draw from it to mature its original Interoperability Land offering.
A sandbox is a virtual environment that allows collaborators to design, test and prototype software in an isolated manner, allowing them to innovate with all the tools of the enterprise environment and none of the overhead. InterOp.Community will provide standards driven interfaces for the common components in modern healthcare systems such as electronic health records (EHR), hospitals, health information exchanges (HIE), labs and insurers, serving as a technology incubator to advance global and interoperable health solutions, officials stated.
The initial stages of deployment of InterOp.Community are already underway, and the sandbox is expected to be launched during the second quarter of 2021. Upon completion of the community sandbox, Interoperability Institute plans to showcase the offering at events such as Interopathons, where individuals can gather and efficiently test their applications.
In a statement, Mary Kratz, executive vice president of Interoperability Institute, said, “We welcome others that share this enthusiasm for openness, transparency, trust, and eagerness to join this effort as co-equals to build upon and advance this community asset. IOI is committed to an open ‘meritocracy’ consistent with thriving open-source communities, as well as commercially friendly open-source licensing. This would assure that participants and consumers alike would have access and latitude to use the outputs of this work as they see fit, including commercial and academic purposes. Together, we are working diligently to launch this shared digital space that will allow for advanced interoperability testing and development across different organizations and systems.”
IHE is an effort by healthcare professionals and others to improve the way computer systems in healthcare share information. IHE promotes the coordinated use of established standards such as DICOM and HL7 to address specific clinical needs in support of optimal patient care.
“We, collectively, are committed to transforming healthcare through the advancement of interoperability,” said Joyce Sensmeier, R.N., senior advisor of informatics at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and IHE USA President. “IHE USA is proud to be partnering with this initiative to accelerate the delivery of innovative healthcare applications that will improve health and healthcare. We look forward to advancing the innovation that will come from this community sandbox.”
