Ibáñez to Discuss Teaching the RDF Framework for use in Medical Data Sharing During vxJourney Program

Luis Ibáñez, one of the best known advocates of open source solutions in healthcare will be interviewed Wednesday, May 14, by Fabian Lopez in the popular vxJourney weekly webinar. Ibañez will be discussing the importance of teaching the Resource Description Framework (RDF) in college courses. RDF is a framework that facilitates the consistent representation of data and is a core element of what is called the Semantic Web. It's use in the context of sharing medical information is highly relevant for personal EHRs, health care exchanges, patient registries, and public health research.

RDF was introduced in the regular curriculum at the Albany Campus of the State University of New York (SUNY) earlier this year. During the webinar, Ibáñez will share some of the insights insights he has gained on how to best teach RDF at the university level.

As detailed in this article, SUNY Albany launched a new VistA EHR Studies program—the most comprehensive one of its kind in the United States—this spring. The program provides students the basis to learn and manage VistA’s fast-growing open source electronic health record (EHR) system. The decision to launch the full program follows a successful pilot course taught at the university this past fall. The RDF course is a key element of the curriculum.

This webinar is one of a series of vxJourney webinars with Ibáñez that discuss the key elements of the course and the curriculum.

Ibáñez is a a contributing author to Open Health News as well as other publications, in particular Opensource.com. Ibáñez writings have generated a large and growing audience. For the second year in a row Ibáñez was one of the winners of Opensource.com's Community Choice Awards. The awards, voted on by Opensource.com readers, are awarded to "members of our community who have excelled in contributing and sharing stories about how open source is changing the world." Ibáñez won awards in both the "Readers Choice Award" category as well as the "Social Sharer" category. 

When not busy writing articles and teaching his VistA course at SUNY, Ibáñez is a Technical Leader at Kitware Inc., and Director of Open Source Community Development at the Open Source EHR Agent (OSEHRA).

At Kitware he is closely involved in the development of open source software for medical imaging applications, in particular, working with the Insight Toolkit (ITK). In collaboration with other instructors, Ibáñez has been teaching a course on Open Source Software Practices at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) since 2007, and, as noted above, now is also teaching at the SUNY Albany, introducing the fundamental technologies that are essential for the open source EHR ecosystem, in particular MUMPS, VistA and EWD.