IBM and Mayo Clinic promote open-source consortium

Attending the HIMSS meeting next week.  This press release about Mayo and IBM was released in advance of the meeting but I gather we will all be hearing more about similar technlogies and initiatives as the meeting progresses through next week.

 ROCHESTER, Minn., April 2 (AScribe Newswire) — Biomedical informatics researchers at Mayo Clinic and IBM today launched a Web site for the newly founded Open Health Natural Language Processing (NLP) Consortium. The consortium is establishing the open-source space to promote past and current development efforts, including participation in information extraction from electronic medical records.

As part of the launch, Mayo Clinic and IBM released their clinical NLP technologies into the public domain. The site, http://www.ohnlp.org , will allow the approximately 2,000 researchers and developers working on clinical language systems worldwide to contribute code and further develop the systems.

"We are inviting our international colleagues to help continue development of these valuable tools," says Christopher Chute, M.D., Dr.P.H., (http://mayoresearch.mayo.edu/mayo/research/staff/chute_cg.cfm) Mayo Clinic bioinformatics expert and senior consultant on the project. "By making it an open-source initiative, we hope to enable wide use of these NLP tools so medical advancements can happen faster and more efficiently."