The Open Health Tools (OHT) Foundation has approved a new project in principle for the development of server-based technology designed to create interoperability among disparate health information systems.

The project is expected to dramatically drive down the cost of interoperability components, which have contributed to significant cost barriers for the HIEs in their development of standards-based solutions.

Open Health Tools is a collaborative effort between national health agencies, major healthcare providers, researchers, academics, international standards bodies, and companies from Australia, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other parts of Europe. Its goal is to develop common healthcare IT products and services and provide software tools and components that accelerate the implementation of electronic health information interoperability platforms, thus improving patient quality of care, safety, and access to electronic health records.

The project will be led by Misys Open Source Solutions, a division of Misys plc, who will work within the open source community to build server-side components for the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) profiles.

The first deliverable will address the IHE profiles for patient identifier cross-referencing and patient demographics query. The plan calls for an operable beta version in February 2009.