ORLANDO—Agfa HealthCare, InterComponentWare (ICW) and Sun Microsystems have joined as foundation members of the new Open eHealth Foundation, an open-source initiative for the healthcare IT arena, which was announced at the 2008 HIMSS conference.

The Open eHealth Foundation will provide software components under an open-source license that will boost the open standards-based exchange of medical information.

The founding members of the Open eHealth Foundation have recognized the necessity to:

• Create a community-driven software development platform to speed up the digitization of the healthcare industry.
• Enable members and healthcare organizations to create solutions based on existing global clinical and administrative standards, and increase interoperability with a wide array of third-party components and platforms.

In the process, the Open eHealth Foundation said it will not develop new standards for interoperability.

Specifically, the foundation intends to leverage existing open source projects to develop a platform that enables its members and health organizations to build free, open-source software components and reference implementations to help achieve a semantic interoperability in the global eHealth sector based on open standards.