IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

For 25 years, hospitals and clinics have had to pay an annual membership fee of as much as $1,200 to legally use the most popular set of standards for the electronic exchange of health information.

On Tuesday, the nonprofit organization responsible for developing those standards, Health Level Seven International, said its intellectual property will be free to use, beginning in the first quarter of 2013.

“The standard forms the foundation for the introduction of Electronic Records Management as part of e-governance in India and defines the paradigm for creating trusted digital repositories for digital preservation,” shared Dr. Dinesh Katre, Associate Director and Head of Department - Human-Centred Design and Computing Group at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).

The government may favour multiple standards for e-governance projects from the earlier stand of supporting single standard for such projects, but the deliberations inside the information technology department are still on with final judgment months away.

The draft policy on open standards, which was open to public review till November 26, attracted many comments on why to choose multiple standards over single one as that would create an unnecessary lock-in of the technology and force citizens to use a single format for all government-related efforts like land records, public records and database etc.

Four drafts and three years later, the Policy on Open Standards for e- Governance was finally released on November 15. The policy is a victory for the open source community fighting since 2007 for the use of free and open formats to manage and create digital data of the Centre and the states.

Programmes like Microsoft Office for data creation, which is patented and thus paid, have dominated e-governance in India till now. This policy released by the Department of Information Technology (IT) would mean that the data maintained by the government will be in a format free to use by public as well as government departments, apart from the one who owns it.

"The government is bringing in a new act called the Clinical Establishment Registeration Regulation Act 2007 under which all clinical establishments in the country, nursing homes, hospitals, diagnostics labs and even one-doctor clinics will be registered mandatorily," Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss told reporters on the sidelines of the Baramati Conference on e-Health here.

After three years of continuous running battles, India's Department of Information Technology has finalized the national policy on Open Standards.

With this announcement, India has become another major country to join the growing open standards movement. Some of the largest greenfield e-government projects in the world are in India and the government aims to take e-gov services to most of India's billion plus population.

Competition and national security concerns arise if Beijing takes the lead

The Japanese government has grown increasingly concerned about China's proposed international standards for smart cities, worried about a competitive disadvantage as companies vie for business.

China has already submitted smart-city proposals to both the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, and the International Electrotechnical Commission, according to a source close to the government here.

Bundesinnenminister Otto Schily will am 4. Februar den neuen Entwicklungsstandard für IT-Systeme des Bundes - das neue V-Modell XT - an der TU München der Öffentlichkeit vorstellen. Das V-Modell XT ist in Behörden und vielen Unternehmen eine Richtschnur für die Organisation und Durchführung von IT-Vorhaben.