Open Source Ideals at HIMSS12

A not-so-intimate group of healthcare IT professionals (a record-setting 37,032 attendees) gathered February 20 at the 2012 HIMSS conference in Las Vegas. They kicked off a week of talks, discussions and collaboration sessions addressing ways to tackle the challenges in the healthcare IT industry.

Silos and proprietary systems have long prevailed in healthcare IT--encompassing everything from patient data to labs and medication management systems.

But in this age of healthcare reform, and with the passage of the HITECH Act, a new dialog about meaningful data sharing has dominated. In accordance, HIMSS had a number of collaborative platforms on the agenda. Topics this year focused heavily on interoperability, standards, and collaboration. In fact, most of the general ideals of the open source community were well-represented in the announcements, education sessions, and exhibit halls of HIMSS this year...