Red Hat's Global Support Services vice-president Lain Gray said the company plans to facilitate the sharing of patients' data and history within various hospitals to promote better healthcare services. 

Towards this end, it has joined hands with Hewlett-Packard (HP), which runs a number of applications related to huge databases of patients and their medical history.

"We have joined hands with a number of government and private hospitals in Maharashtra. Most of these hospitals are in the early stages of digitalisation of patients' records and medical history. In collaboration with HP, we plan to make this data available to every hospital connected through our platform. This will ensure better healthcare services and better treatment to patients in every corner of the country," Gray said.

Gray pointed out that data portability has been a major problem, especially in healthcare sector in India.

"Banks, financial institutions and companies in insurance sector have adopted to open source technologies for quite some time now. The government establishments, telecom sector and institutes in healthcare are yet to adapt to this kind of work culture," he added. He, however, did not disclose the number of hospitals that are being serviced through this programme.

"We have just started off this service. We are catering to hospitals in Maharashtra during the initial phase followed by hospitals in other states," he added.

The programme would provide various case histories and it would work as a knowledge and information platform for all the hospitals, he stated.

Red Hat has been serving establishments in the banking, financial services and telecommunication sector in India with Canara Bank [Get Quote], Central Bank of India [Get Quote] and Bank of Punjab as its prime customers. Red Hat's Pune unit has been acting as a global support centre over last three years.