OSCON Health Track Schedule Released

The schedule for the health track at O'Reilly's 2011 Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Oregon, has just been released. This is one of the most important open health conferences this year. Last year's conference was a tremendous success. The OSCON organizing committee has done a good job with this year's line up. From what has been released so far, this year there will be ten presentations over two days, July 27 and 28.

The presentations cover a broad range of topics and applications. Presentations cover a fairly broad range of applications. Indivo will be making a presentation on their open source Personal Health Record (PHR). In addition there will be another presentation on open source adaptive technology which is one of the toughest vendor-lock areas to crack. Presenters will include some of the most interesting people in open health IT, including Shahid Shah, Fred Trotter, and Tom Jones.

Surprisingly there don't seem to be tracks that cover the two most important developments in open health this year. The first one is the move by the Department of Veterans Affair to create an open source code repository where VistA will continue to be developed in collaboration with the community. The second major area is the application of open source tools to build mobile health applications. There have been some fantastic developments in this area in the Third World, from Africa, to Asia, to Latin America. Hopefully we are jumping the gun and we will see some additional panels in the health care track.