Eishay Smith - IBM Almaden Research Center
Lead and Architect
Speaking Topic: Lowering the barrier to creation of a National Health Information Network.

Eishay Smith is a lead and architect of the IBM Almaden Research Center contribution to the Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework (OHF). In last few years Eishay focused on the Healthcare IT domain and worked on IBM's Healthcare Information and Content Management Infrastructure. Eishay's main interests are open source, advanced software technology and binding them to benefit the "long tail" of the Healthcare industry (i.e. the small clinics and patients).

This presentation will discuss two important elements to lowering the barrier to creation of a National Health Information Network. The first element is the adoption of Interoperability Standards. These standards while guarantee open interfaces and prevent vendor lock-in. The second is the role of open source solutions. While adoption of open standards by large EMR vendors is critically important to enterprise healthcare providers and payors, the availability of inexpensive (or free) standardized Healthcare Information Technology for small physician practices is critical. By analogy to the emergence of the World Wide Web, a framework for creating inexpensive and open source applications for physicians will be as important to realizing a National Health Information Network as availability of free browser technology wa sto the growth of the internet. Aditionally the presentation will provide examples of the growing HIT market adoption to open source as we've seen in the last IHE Connectathon. We will discuss the question of why there is currently exponential growth of commercial vendors starting to use HIT FOSS to accomplish interoperability. Finally the discussion will steer towards the success stories for open source in the National Healthcare Information Network (NHIN)

Listen Now! [.mp3]