Courtney Spencer
cspencer@blackducksoftware.com
CourtneyEarlier this year Black Duck Software joined Open Health Tools (OHT). This week we had the opportunity to present at the OHT board member meeting chaired by Skip McGaughey, OHT Executive Director. Peter Vescuso, EVP of Marketing and Business Development, gave an overview of Black Duck’s business and solutions to the membership and outlined the ways we can support the OHT mission and membership.

OHT is an open source community creating an ecosystem of OSS developers and health care professionals dedicated to developing a health interoperability framework, including tools and reference applications. For example the OHT forge hosts Hitex, the Health Information Text Extraction system, one of the many OSS health care projects tracked by Black Duck. Hitex, which is built on top of the GATE framework, provides analysis pipelines and modules to extract health information from clinical documents.

The Black Duck KnowledgeBase of open source projects is a comprehensive information resource on all OSS projects. Within the Knowledgebase, we track and report on the OSS projects specific to healthcare: over 900 projects, representing124 million lines of code and $8B USD of development value and 45,000 staff years (see our analysis reported in the press release referenced above). We offered to the OHT membership to provide custom analysis and information on any and all of these projects to promote their use and adoption. In addition, we encouraged the use of our free code search website www.koders.com with over 3 billion lines of available code and offered our management best practices to the OHT community for managing development with open source to maximize the value while controlling its use.

We look forward to evangelizing the opportunity for OSS to improve the healthcare industry and to support the OHT community.

For more insight into OSS and the healthcare industry, check out the webinar we recently delivered with CollabNet and Brian Behlendorf on how OSS is revolutionizing healthcare.

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