Health IT Engineers Rev Up For Another Connectathon

More than 500 software engineers from more than 100 companies will convene in Chicago next week for the 15th annual Connectathon to work out bugs in exchanging data between health IT systems.

The Connectathon, organized by a not-for-profit organization called Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise, gives the people who actually build health information technology systems a chance to rub shoulders with their counterparts from other firms and troubleshoot exchanges of information against a common set of test scripts.

New to the Connectathon this year, slated to run Jan. 27-31, is a “Plugfest,” sponsored by the Continua Health Alliance, an industry consortium of healthcare organizations and mobile-health-device makers. Health IT vendors will test their systems' connectivity to mobile devices using Continua's interoperability protocols.