November Issue Available

The November issue of the OSBR is now available in HTML and PDF formats at the OSBR website. The theme this month is "Health and Life Sciences" and Brian Barry and Peter Tanner from Open Health Tools are this month's guest editors. The articles in this issue include:

Brian Barry, CEO of Bedarra Research Labs and CTO of Open Health Tools (OHT), covers OHT's planned development of a common platform. In his article, he applies his experience with the founding of Eclipse to the problems of interoperable healthcare.

Mark Yendt, Duane Bender and Brian Minaji of Mohawk College describe their reference implementation of the Canada Health Infoway pan-Canadian Electronic Health Record Solution. They see the need to involve a range of partners from both the private and public sector to achieve success for the project.

Jacob Brauer of WebReach describes the Mirth Project, an open source healthcare interface engine and interface repository created and professionally supported by WebReach. Mirth attacks the interoperability issue directly through providing an interconnecting middleware for health information systems.

Skip McGaughey, Executive Director of OHT, and Ken Rubin, a senior healthcare architect, describe the requirement for a more out-reaching community which encompasses end users, operational users, and developers.

Jon Siegel and Richard Mark Soley explore the relationship between open source and open standards by examining the results of their interviews of developers of open source tools based on open standards.

The editorial theme for the upcoming December issue is "Enabling Innovation" and the guest editor will be Steven Muegge from Carleton University. Submissions for this issue are due by November 22.

Upcoming November Issue

The theme for the upcoming issue of the OSBR is Health and Life Sciences and we hope to publish shortly after November 10th. Here is a preview of some of the articles in the upcoming issue:

Jacob Brauer from the Mirth Project provides an overview of healthcare interface engines, the healthcare and connectivity standards Mirth supports, and compares Mirth to other interface engines.

Mark Yendt, Duane Bender, and Brian Minaji from Mohawk College describe their reference implementation of the Canada Health Infoway pan-Canadian Electronic Health Record Solution standard and the lessons learned that can help reduce the cost, risk and time barriers to widespread adoption of eHealth systems in Canada.

Brian Berry from Open Health Tools introduces an open source ecosystem where members of the health and information technology professions can collaborate to build interoperable electronic health record systems.