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Organizations in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States have formed a new consortium to promote the use of open source software in health care.

The initiative, called Open Health Tools Inc., is based on the model of the Eclipse Foundation, which is an open source community of developers who provide software components that others can use to build software products. Skip McGaughey, a co-founder of Ottawa-based Eclipse, is executive director of Asheville, N.C.-based Open Health Tools.

The goal of Open Health Tools is to bring together stakeholders to develop software that enables different information systems to interoperate and share data. The initiative brings together national consumers, standards development organizations, health care professionals, commercial vendors and open source programmers. “All plans and codes will be developed in the open,” McGaughey says. “It’s like Linux and there will be lots of different software components.”

Charter government agencies involved in Open Health Tools include the Veterans Health Administration in the United States, Health Infoway Inc. in Canada, National Health Service in England and National e-Health Transition Authority in Australia.

Initial participating standards development organizations are Health Level Seven, Healthcare Services Specifications Project, International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation and Object Management Group.

Vendors and open source organizations providing software include B2 International, BT, CollabNet, Eclipse, IBM Corp., Innoopract, Inpriva, JP Systems, Kestral, NexJ Systems, Ocean Informatics, Oracle Corp., Ozmosis, Palamida and Red Hat.

Many of these vendors are veterans of the open source community, and all bring special skills, McGaughey says. Inpriva, for instance, specializes in security, Kestral in radiology and medical imaging, and Palamida in intellectual property licensing.

Open Health Tools is creating an international council of clinicians to ensure that the group’s work will meet the needs of health professionals.

The initiative is seeking additional participation from all industry stakeholders, including established health care I.T. vendors. More information is available openhealthtools.org.