Everything is CONNECTed
 | |
| Mary Stevens, Editor |
Project manager Vish Sankaran announced that he’ll step down soon as the FHA’s program director, just before the third CONNECT Code-A-Thon showed CONNECT’s continuing emergence as an open-source entity—albeit one with a federal agency background and a national focus.
What’s going on with CONNECT? A lot. I spoke with FHA CONNECT team leads Brian Behlendorf, collaboration advisor (contractor), and Dave Riley, CONNECT initiative lead (contractor) as the Code-a-thon was about to wrap up at Florida International University in Miami. They described both an event and a project that are gathering momentum.
Interest is building: “Almost 200 people registered and just over 100 showed up—which are both good numbers for any event where you’re not asking $1,000 to attend,” said Behlendorf.
Sixty attended the business track, new at this event, opening a dialogue with health IT businesses in the Miami area about how they might use CONNECT to build interoperability into their systems.
“We started out as a government agency software development project, and a year ago, [the FHA] wanted to open that up,” Riley said. CONNECT was released to the public at HIMSS 2009, and “Brian came on board in June to help us understand the patterns of success with the open source community and help us with moving through the phase change.”
“In one year, we’re able to move from the typical government project, from a management perspective, to more of an open-source community. We’re not where I want to be 100 percent yet, but we’re moving right along on that spectrum, toward becoming that open source community that’s supporting an ecosystem of members around the solution itself,” Riley said.
“This is part of a phase change in the project, from being something that’s driven behind closed doors or driven to one agenda, to being something that’s expanded to be a collective agenda,” said Behlendorf.
Community Website: www.connectopensource.org
Another CONNECT happened this week. This CONNECT (Clinical Evaluation Of Remote Notification to Reduce Time to Clinical Decision) trial evaluated a wireless remote monitoring and notification system based on Medtronic’s Conexus-enabled cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators.
The result: Additional evidence that clinical care can be improved with the use of remote monitoring … thanks to the secure and reliable transmission of data.
Everything is CONNECTed.
Mary Stevens, editor
mstevens@trimedmedia.com