October 2005

Initiative advances open software standards in healthcare

IBM’s healthcare and education practices division has announced a major initiative to improve interoperability and information-access through the development of open software standards.

Under this initiative, IBM is pledging royalty-free access to its patent portfolio for the development and implementation of selected open healthcare and education software standards built around Web services, electronic forms, and open document formats.

Industry growth and service delivery in healthcare and education currently are hampered by incompatible document formats and proprietary technology, making it difficult to find, retrieve, and share data such as standardized medical records.

IBM believes its new initiative can help address the complex ecosystem across which information must be accurately, securely, and efficiently shared and assist their clients in improving the quality and lowering the costs of services they deliver to patients, physicians, students, and teachers around the world.

In the healthcare industry, access to IBM’s patents could spur worldwide development of standardized electronic health-record networks, fostering the widespread adoption of health information technology.

IBM’s work with the healthcare and education industries follows IBM’s pledge of 500 software patents to the open source community earlier this year. Since then, other companies and organizations have made similar pledges helping to create an open source “patent commons.”

IBM’s new initiative to advance open software standards in healthcare and education and further related information will be posted on IBM’s Web site at www.ibm.com/research/innovation/ip.

Source: IBM, www-1.ibm.com/press/PressServletForm.wss

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