GOSCON 2008 Showcases Open Public Health IT

This year, GOSCON will feature a first-of-its-kind Open Public Health IT track designed to explore both a strategic direction for open source in the public health sector as well as real-world applications that are in use today by agencies around the world. GOSCON is bringing together leaders in government, open source, and public health who will share their deep, practical experience in public health, enterprise architectures, standards, as well as open source tools and methodologies as they are applied to this domain.

The GOSCON Open Public Health IT track features an executive panel that will discuss the potential implications of current initiatives around the Medicaid Information Technology Architecture (MITA) as well as frameworks for interoperability, funding models, data sharing, and privacy. Rick Howard (CIO, Oregon Department of Human Services), Bernard Golden (CEO, Navica), and Kathleen Connor (Principal Program Manager, Health Solutions Group, Microsoft Corp.) will participate. An award-winning application developed by the Health Service Executive in Ireland (HSE) to support health service planning, epidemiology, and environmental incident management will be presented, as will TriSano® an open source citizen-focused disease surveillance application developed as a collaborative project with Collaborative Software Initiative and the State of Utah. In addition, lessons learned in transitioning from proprietary software to OpenELIS, an open enterprise laboratory information system, will be presented.

For more information on the Open Public Health IT track, the 2008 GOSCON program, sessions and speaker bios are available on the web.