Today I meet with Vish Sankaran, whose official title is ‘Program Director Federal Health Architecture’ from what I can tell, that post is just as important as it sounds. Vish was, along with representatives of several major federal agencies, presenting the new NHIN open source infrastructure project called Connect. We have been waiting patiently to see code drop, and according to Vish, that should happen at connectopensource.org tomorrow!
I first heard about this project when Harris Corporation announced that they had won the NHIN contract. Harris is a big government contract shop and had apparently little experience with either FOSS or Health IT. I was please to be later proven wrong when they found that they did have considerable VistA talent on-board.
I was befuddled about how a company could announce that a product would be both public domain AND open source, seeing as how those terms have very different meanings. After my initial contact with them, it was obvious that they did not really understand the FOSS culture or community, (they actually asked a FOSS development group to sign an NDA to reveal more details of the project) and after hearing my less-than-flattering comments regarding their announcement, they made it clear that they would simply put their heads down and code until they had a product… then they would let the Office of National Coordinator sort out how to interface with the community.
I am not sure when or how Sun became involved in the project. But I was relieved to hear it. Sun has much more experience with the FOSS community, and from what I can tell Sun has bet the farm on FOSS. I have already had a conversation with some representatives from the Sun team about the release, but they were necessarily tight lipped about important details like licensing and project structure ahead of the official announcement. I hope to arrange a podcast with them soon, now that they can speak more freely.
Which brings us to today. Today Vish and his panel were discussing what they had working and what they had planned with regards to both the NHIN and Connect projects. More importantly, Vish was willing to do a brief podcast with me. My audio seemed pretty broken up… but keep listening because he sounds fine.
Vish Sankaran Interview (in ogg)
Vish Sankaran Interview (in mp3)
P.S. I am not the first person to record Vish