Apelon Announces Availability of a Completely Open Source Terminology Management Solution

RIDGEFIELD, Conn., Jan. 17, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Apelon, Inc., a leading provider of terminology and data interoperability solutions, today announced that its open source Distributed Terminology System (Open DTS) terminology server now supports the open source MySQL database system. As a result, the healthcare industry now has access to a completely open source solution for the management and deployment of healthcare data standards.

Healthcare's growing demands for data sharing are focusing attention on interoperability techniques and technologies. Enterprises are rightly concerned that such mission-critical capabilities not be locked to proprietary applications.  Open source solutions like DTS and MySQL enable healthcare organizations to lessen dependence on proprietary software.  This reduces the cost of deploying enterprise applications, provides much more cost-effective licensing models, eases vendor-specific integration issues, and provides the ability to leverage a much broader universe of developers.

An early advocate of open source software in healthcare, Apelon made DTS open source in early 2007.  Since then the software has been downloaded by over 3500 informaticists and healthcare organizations worldwide.  Open DTS supports a wide range of commercial database platforms such as DB2, InterSystems Cache®, Oracle, and SQL Server. By adding support for open source MySQL, Open DTS users can now deploy a fully-open source terminology solution and benefit from open source cost, integration and adoption advantages.

"Apelon has helped many healthcare organizations render health data more comparable, leading to increased data sharing and broader access," said Stephen Coady, Apelon's President and CEO.  "By supporting MySQL we enable the use of sophisticated terminology tools without requiring the user to significantly burden the database management system resources of an organization.  This Open DTS upgrade is another example of our commitment to the open source model.  Apelon is thrilled to be enabling interoperability initiatives, because care records, combined and comparable, will dramatically improve quality and lower cost."

Terminology servers support data standardization and interoperability in Electronic Medical Records systems, Healthcare Information Exchanges, and Clinical Decision Support systems. Open DTS is a comprehensive terminology server platform that centralizes terminology knowledge – such as national standards SNOMED CT®, LOINC®, RxNorm® and NDF-RT® – and provides terminology services such as normalization, lookup, translation, and aggregation to other network applications. Open DTS is used by healthcare integrators, vendors, researchers and care delivery organizations around the world for the management of industry standards, local vocabularies and their associated mappings.

For further information about Open DTS and Open DTS support of MySQL, visit: apelon-dts.sourceforge.net.

About Apelon

Apelon is an international clinical informatics company focusing on data standardization and interoperability. Apelon software and professional services helps leading healthcare enterprises, life sciences organizations and government agencies improve the quality, comparability and accessibility of their information.  Visit www.Apelon.com for additional information.

SOURCE Apelon, Inc.