Just to let you all know of an open source success story. Open Integration Engine (a fork of Mirth Connect) is now safely ensconced in the loving arms of the Eclipse Foundation.
I am now in the proces of setting up an Eclipse Working Group - a formal collaboration of interested vendors who rely on OIE that gathers and administers funds (both their own contributions and those from sponsors) in order to achieve common goals such as adding significant new features, ensuring timely releases, quick responses to critical issues, and also promotion of OIE.
I also have the green light from Eclipse to submit an application to the UN’s Digital Public Goods catalogue; there’s a gap for a healthcare specific integration engine, and once placed there it’s profile will rise even higher.
In further validation, here at NovaMap we switched an NHS Trust to OIE and have OIE product support or hosting contracts with two medium sized health system vendors. Our sales pipeline is very healthy. This feels like a sustainable approach to adopting open source in healthcare.
We have started to develop a couple of promising partnerships with organisations who develop health applications for lower income countries.