California HealthCare Foundation donates $10M in code to open source effort

The California HealthCare Foundation this week agreed to turn over key components from the software behind a $10 million health information exchange project it put together a few years ago to an open source organization. The software was originally developed for the Santa Barbara County Care Data Exchange, an early RHIO that closed its doors in 2006. CHCF turned the components over to the Open Health Tools, a collaborative effort between national health agencies, healthcare providers, researchers, academics and international standards bodies in several countries. OHT's goal is to develop shared health IT products and services, and offer tools and components that speed the availability of health data interoperability. The donation was assisted by CollabNet, a collaborative software development platform, and Palamida, an application security solution for open-source software.

To learn more about the donation:
- read this CHCF press release
- read this description of the Open Health Information Exchange Project

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