Former ONCHIT head Kolodner joins Open Health Tools

Robert Kolodner, the former head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, says he has joined the open-source healthcare information technology community as chief health information officer of Open Health Tools, Asheville, N.C.

“We're still working through the details,” Kolodner said of his specific duties during an interview. “It's all about personal-centered health and improving the health of individual's world wide. We're looking at innovative ways to collaborate and establishing sort of a hybrid open-source technology.”

Kolodner said he officially joined Open Health Tools last week.

The not-for-profit represents a community of global IT corporations, academic institutions, governments and individuals, including IBM, Oracle, Misys, Red Hat as well as the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department. The aim of the community is “to create a common health interoperability framework, exemplary tools and reference applications to support health information interoperability,” according to its Web site.

Launched in 2007, Open Health Tools uses the legal framework and software development tools of the Eclipse Foundation. Skip McGaughey, one of the pioneers of the Eclipse Foundation, is the executive director of Open Health Tools.

Kolodner stepped down from the top spot at the ONC earlier this year after serving since 2006 as either the interim or permanent head of the HHS agency charged with coordinating health IT programs across the federal government.

Kolodner announced in an e-mail to friends and colleagues last month that Sept. 22 was his last day as a government employee. Kolodner said in a recent interview he also was under contract to the VA as an adviser. A psychiatrist, Kolodner worked 28 years at the VA in medical informatics, including as chief medical information officer.