14/12/2011
The Clinical Information Modelling Initiative (CIMI) group led by Dr Stan Huff (Intermountain Health, Utah) met here in London 29 Nov – 1 Dec to make a final decision on formalism, from the two remaining – openEHR archetypes and various forms of UML (previous posts on CIMI: DCMs & RM, on formalisms). Instead of simply choosing one, the group made a more strategic choice of designating openEHR ADL/AOM 1.5 as the core formalism, with a corresponding profile of UML being developed to enable the more numerous UML-based developers (e.g. VA, NHS etc) to use archetypes within their UML toolchains.
Here is the public announcement resulting from this meeting.
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Computing, Health Informatics, openehr | Tagged: archetype, DCM, e-health, Health Informatics, openEHR | 
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Posted by wolandscat
07/07/2011
I will be attending a ‘Fresh Look’ meeting in Washington next week. The idea is to make some progress on the topic of ‘detailed clinical models’ (DCMs). Some of the goals include setting up a repository of DCMs, establishing governance, and defining a roadmap for tooling. Underlying all this is a huge list of formalisms and models, including OWL, UML, ADL, HL7 MIF, XSD, LRA, RMIMs, CDA templates, greenCDA and so on.
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7 Comments | Computing, Health Informatics, openehr | Tagged: archetype, e-health, HL7, models, openEHR, standards | Permalink
Posted by wolandscat
03/07/2011
On 27 June, I ran a workshop at TOOLS 2011 in Zurich, entitled ‘Creating the new Eiffel Technology Community’. I did this at the invitation of Bertrand Meyer, the inventor of Eiffel and also the TOOLS conference programme chair.
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Posted by wolandscat
08/06/2011
Let’s talk about mindmaps and archetypes. Mindmaps seem to be fuzzy and friendly – we need them because they are incredibly efficient at transmitting information to humans. Archetypes seem über-mathematical, but we need them to do proper model-based computing.
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1 Comment | Computing, Health Informatics, openehr | Tagged: archetype, DCM, e-health, Health Informatics, models, openEHR | Permalink
Posted by wolandscat
24/05/2011
Software developers and ontologists generally live in two different worlds. The former group think they are building systems to perform information processing and computation, and the latter group think they are formally describing some aspect of the world.
[Note: slight change to wording of FOPP on 30/May/2011]
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9 Comments | Computing, Health Informatics | Tagged: Health Informatics, HL7, ontologies, software engineering, standards | Permalink
Posted by wolandscat
18/05/2011
Previous: HL7 null flavors part 1
Null flavors – Objection #3: ontological problems
The following table shows the current HL7v3 null flavor values. A full version of the table appears in Grahame Grieve’s blog post. Read the rest of this entry »
4 Comments | Computing, Health Informatics, openehr | Tagged: data types, Health Informatics, HL7, ISO 21090, models, openEHR, standards | Permalink
Posted by wolandscat
18/05/2011
(With apologies to those who use international English and normally spell it as ‘flavour’; in this post, I will spell it properly in informal text, and in the US way when referring to the formal HL7 null flavour concept.)
Grahame Grieve has pointed out in a recent blog post that I am a major critic of HL7 ‘null flavours’. This is correct, but the reasons are probably misunderstood, so I will try to clarify here. Read the rest of this entry »
7 Comments | Computing, Health Informatics, openehr | Tagged: data types, Health Informatics, HL7, ISO, ISO 21090, models, openEHR, standards | Permalink
Posted by wolandscat
01/05/2011
or, e-health seen through the prism of an ancient pantheon of gods…
Grahame Grieve’s recent blog entry on the HL7 Fresh Look Task Force seems a good excuse for me to have another big picture look at e-health. The fact that HL7 is doing this indicates two things at least: that it thinks something is wrong in the HL7 organisation, and that it thinks something is not going right in e-health in general. That’s good to see. HL7 has been the single most influential standards body in e-health for at least 15 years. It has spent massive effort in the last decade on an effort called HL7v3, or ‘version 3′. This effort has not been a resounding success, indeed the evidence indicates the opposite. I have historically been one of the strongest critics of the technical architecture of this effort, so my statements here won’t come as any surprise. To give credit where it is due however, I have come to see that HL7 was trying to the right kind of thing, just that they lacked the appropriate expertise to do it. Solving the challenges in the area of e-health is no mean feat, and maybe some of them are unsolvable, so take that statement as a commiseration rather than a criticism. Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments | Computing, Health Informatics | Tagged: e-health, Health Informatics, HL7, standards | Permalink
Posted by wolandscat
19/12/2010
I have often bemoaned the state of standards for the e-health sector. Earlier posts provide details. The main argument is that the key specifications the sector needs are for interoperable data, information and knowledge, but that the main approach to getting these is via standards agencies, whose processes almost guarantee failure. Hence the ‘standards crisis’ in health informatics. The failure is not innate in standards agencies as such; it is just that standards agency committees in the e-health sector are doing the wrong thing. They are acting as de facto R&D fora rather than as a choosing mechanism on proven designs from industry. In my view (and experience) this is because among the members and leaders of those committees are almost no engineers, i.e. people who understand a) how standards actually work in other industries and b) that design is an essential element of what is being standardised. The consequence of the situation in e-health standards is ‘design-by-committee’.
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4 Comments | Computing, Health Informatics | Tagged: ehealth, software engineering, standards | Permalink
Posted by wolandscat
27/11/2010
I was in Zurich last week (Nov 21-25) for the Future of Software Engineering (FOSE) symposium, held at ETH Zurich university campus on the occasion of the 60th birthday of Bertrand Meyer, the inventor of the Eiffel programming language, which is itself celebrated its own 25th birthday on a 3rd day held after the two FOSE symposium days. The group of speakers attracted to speak at FOSE included many luminaries from the history of computing, as shown below in the panel at the end of day 1.
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3 Comments | Computing | Tagged: software engineering | Permalink
Posted by wolandscat
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