Medical Practice Management, Electronic Health Records Applications Lead Open Source Software Projects for Health Care, Accordin

WALTHAM, Mass., May 11, 2010 -  A year of significant growth in the number of open source projects established to develop health care applications was led by practice management and electronic records management projects, according to an analysis by Black Duck Software, the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software.

Projects such as CARE2X, aimed at increasing integration and interoperability between multiple incompatible health care information systems within an institution, and OpenVista, the open-source version of VistA, top the list of active health care OSS projects in the Black Duck KnowledgeBase, which counts nearly 900 open source software (OSS) projects with a health care focus. The analysis shows a 13 percent growth in the number of projects, with a 38 percent growth in lines of code from 2009 numbers. Projected development costs for the projects -- which combined include over 124 million lines of code -- have grown to approximately $8 billion USD, up from 2009's estimate of $6B, representing 45,000 staff-years of development effort.

Black Duck also announced its membership in Open Health Tools (http://openhealthtools.org), an open source community creating an ecosystem of OSS developers and health care professionals dedicated to developing a health interoperability framework, including tools and reference applications. The Open Health Tools forge hosts Hitex, the Health Information Text Extraction system (https://hitex.projects.openhealthtools.org), one of the largest OSS health care projects tracked by Black Duck. Hitex, which is built on top of the GATE framework, provides analysis pipelines and modules to extract health information from clinical documents.

"The Open Health Tools community welcomes new member Black Duck Software," said Skip McGaughey, Executive Director, OpenHealthTools.org. "Black Duck's development tools address issues that create barriers to open source adoption. In combination with OHT community tools and reference applications, designed to promote interoperability in health care IT, Black Duck's support will increase the pace at which OHT projects evolve and are adopted by health care organizations."

"In addition to improving access to data and bringing innovation to health care IT, the top projects in the Black Duck analysis offer faster time-to-solution and cost-avoidance to an industry facing sweeping reform at the federal level," said Peter Vescuso, Executive Vice President, Black Duck Software. "The increased focus we see on interoperability as a project goal in health care reflects trends in the broader open source community, which supports the increasing role that open source projects can play in advancing the state of health care IT."

Black Duck spiders the Internet for open source code, collecting information about projects and code into the Black Duck KnowledgeBase, which contains information on more than 230,000 open source projects from more than 4,500 unique websites. Black Duck reported earlier this year that more than 19,000 new open source projects were started in 2009.

For more information, please visit www.blackducksoftware.com.

About Black Duck Software
Black Duck Software is the leading provider of products and services for automating the management, governance and secure use of open source software, at enterprise scale, in a multi-source development process. Black Duck™ enables companies to shorten time-to-market and reduce development costs while mitigating the management, security and compliance challenges associated with open source software. Black Duck Software powers Koders.com, the industry's leading code search engine for open source, and is among the 500 largest software companies in the world, according to Softwaremag.com. The company is headquartered near Boston and has offices in San Mateo, California, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Beijing. For more information, visit www.blackducksoftware.com.

Black Duck, Know Your Code and the Black Duck logo are registered trademarks of Black Duck Software, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. Koders is a trademark of Black Duck Software, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.