IBM is donating 150,000 lines of code to help small and medium-sized physician practices connect their clinical applications into larger regional health information networks.

By donating the code to an open-source organization, the Eclipse Open Health Foundation, IBM hopes to make it easier and less expensive for smaller practices to buy clinical applications that can interoperate.

The donated client-side components to IBM's Health Information Exchange technology are most likely to be used by independent software vendors that sell clinical applications, such as electronic health record systems, to smaller and midsized physician practices, says Joe Jasinski, program director of IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences.

The code can allow clinical applications to access disparate health data, regardless of where it resides, as if it were stored in a single repository.

This is the first of several code donations IBM plans to make to the Eclipse Open Health Foundation, Jasinski says.