New IBM Initiative Advances Open Software Standards

IBM's healthcare and education practices today announced a major initiative to improve interoperability and information-access through the development of open software standards.

Under this initiative, IBM is pledging royalty-free access to its patent portfolio for the development and implementation of selected open healthcare and education software standards built around web services, electronic forms and open document formats. 

Industry growth and service delivery in healthcare and education currently are hampered by the proliferation of incompatible document formats and proprietary technology, making it difficult to find, retrieve and share data such as standardized medical records and educational resources.  

IBM believes its new initiative can help address the complex ecosystem across which information must be accurately, securely and efficiently shared and assist our clients in these two vital industries as they work to improve the quality and lower the costs of services they deliver to patients, physicians, students and teachers around the world. 

"Healthcare remains one of the greatest challenges for our society and our economy worldwide. Many industries are transforming, using open software standards to create a powerful platform for innovation and industry growth," said Neil de Crescenzo, vice president, Global Healthcare, IBM Business Consulting Services. 

"Fueling innovation and creating a highly skilled workforce requires greater collaboration between students, administrators, industry, school systems and institutions of higher education," said Sean Rush, general manager, IBM Global Education Industry. 

Innovation based on open software standards can help transform both healthcare and education.

In the healthcare industry, access to IBM's patents has the potential to spur worldwide development of standardized electronic health-record networks, fostering the widespread adoption of health information technology. 

For example, where healthcare standards seek to provide higher priority to emergency-room requests for patient information than routine office inquiries in web services applications, IBM's patents differentiating levels of service could speed implementation of such prioritization. 

In Education, open access to IBM's patented technology can improve the effectiveness and productivity of the education process and of the management of school districts and institutions. 

IBM has patents that use web services to link students and teachers anywhere in the world based on the compatibility of their teaching and learning styles. 

IBM's work with the healthcare and education industries follows IBM's pledge of 500 software patents to the open source community earlier this year.  Since then, other companies and organizations have made similar pledges helping to create an open source "patent commons."