OCI provides leadership at the NHIN CONNECT Code-A-Thon

ST. LOUIS, MO - OCI attended the NHIN CONNECT Code-A Thon last Thursday at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C., contributing time and expertise to the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) open source software system known as CONNECT. NHIN CONNECT integrates healthcare information from many providers, enabling Healthcare Information Exchanges at state and national levels. The Code-A-Thon forum brought together leading software developers & contributors for a hands-on collaborative session to establish CONNECT as the most viable software product for Health Information Exchanges.

The large number of developers broke into groups to address and resolve many development issues that arise as participation in the project grows. OCI was the lead in the area of “source code reorganization” and hosted a table. The goal is to ensure, as the code base grows in size, that the modules are easily navigable and the structure intuitive. Open source projects are unique in that any developer can look at and improve the code. By allowing such access the code evolves more rapidly and becomes more robust much more quickly than proprietary projects. Open source developers contribute more effectively to well organized code bases. As a consequence the OCI table was very popular.

Dr. Ebrahim Moshiri, CEO of OCI, commented, "OCI software engineers have been long term participants and major contributors in many open source projects. As a result we have a deep understanding of the ingredients for success. Thanks to the open sourcing of the CONNECT software by the Federal Government agencies who developed it, OCI is now able to use its expertise in supporting this important addition to the nation’s health system."

Additional information:

http://govhealthit.com/newsitem.aspx?nid=72025
http://www.connectopensource.org/display/Gateway/CONNECT+Community+Portal