Trieste's experience 

The Higher Education in Clinical Engineering (HECE) of the University of Trieste, with its laboratories of Health Telematics (HTL), Advanced Networking (ANL), Neuromodelling (NML) and Open Source (OSL) at the Department EEI has a 15 year experience in developing open solutions for archival, transmission, exchange, retrieval and visualization of data, signals, images and reports within an integrated hospital-territory-citizen system.

The first experience of HECE in PACSes and Open Source took place in 1991 at the Cattinara Hospital, where, since 1988, the first European installation of a commercial PACS was running. The need was to open the Commview PACS to the metropolitan network of Trieste. The HECE group developed the OPACS open source tools to take care of this.

In 1995 the group started a project called DPACS (Data & Picture Archiving and Communication System), having the goal to find a complete solution for a distributed environment to save and recover any medical data of the citizen within the European territory. The DPACS systems substituted the previous CommView PACS at the Cattinara Hospital since 1997. 

Padova's experience 

After a first experience with the project Raynux (1998),the Department of Medical and Diagnostic Sciences and Special Therapies at the University of Padova developed, starting 2002, the MARiS project, consisting in open tools for the management of the administrative data in a hospital, particularly related to the radiology activity (RIS); in the last two years this work has been extended to the exchange of clinical documents within and among the healthcare enterprises.

Trieste and Padova together 

During the "EuroPACS-MIR in the Enlarged Europe” Conference organized by HECE in September 2004, it appeared clear that the two groups of Trieste and Padova exhibited a complemented experience and shared a common vision of the future of the e-health.

The groups worked together in putting the basis of the o3 suite of products.

In 2008 the o3 Consortium created a spinoff company, o3 Enterprise, in order to take care of the services related to o3 products in Italy and abroad.