Author Archives: wolandscat

Yet another e-health standards comparison, corrected

Recently HSCIC and NHS England published an Interoperability Handbook, intended to help provider CIOs and others steer the difficult waters of obtaining interoperable health IT solutions. The target audience is listed as: CCG Clinical Leaders, Chief Clinical Information Officers, Chief … Continue reading

Posted in Health Informatics, openehr, standards | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Goodbye to Adobe FrameMaker, Hello AsciiDoctor

I am probably one of the longest time users of Adobe FrameMaker in the world. I started using it at version 2, sometime around 1990, and finished with it a few months ago. For most of this period it was … Continue reading

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, openehr | Tagged , , | 27 Comments

openEHR in Brazil – Sirio Libanes

openEHR training session last week at Hospital Sirio Libanes, one of the premiere teaching and research hospitals in Brazil. I delivered the background and theory part, Samuel Frade and Bostjan Lah (both from Marand) delivered the programming part. We were … Continue reading

Posted in Health Informatics, openehr | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

The folly of the obsession with source code

My favourite topic these days is the phenomenon of fundamentalist thinking. You don’t need to go to Iraq to find it, it’s all around us…. Recently I chanced upon a post entitled ‘Coding is not the new literacy’ by Chris … Continue reading

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, openehr, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Charlie Hebdo – in defence of a civil society

Normally this blog is reserved for my work. This evening I make an exception. I am outraged and disgusted at what I see has happened in Paris this afternoon. A massacre of 12 at and around the offices of Charlie … Continue reading

Posted in Culture, Philosophy, Politics | Leave a comment

Windows 8 Metro, high DPI screen chaos, and other epic fails of modern life

Windows 8 – a Lesson in Corporate Schizophrenia Recently I moved up to a Dell XPS 15 (fast i7 machine) with Windows 8.1, from an old Dell with Windows 7. I am now, along with the rest of us, suffering … Continue reading

Posted in Computing | 7 Comments

Semantic scalability – the core challenge in e-health?

A few months ago I posted on what makes a standard or set of standards in e-health investible. The headline requirements I can summarise as follows: platform-based: the standards must work together in a single coherent technical ecosystem, based on … Continue reading

Posted in Health Informatics, openehr | Tagged , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Barriers to open source in the NHS

There is a discussion going on on the NHS Technology Community site on what the barriers to open source are in the NHS, and how to address them. The posts are interesting, but one thing is lacking: a statement of what it … Continue reading

Posted in Health Informatics, openehr | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

No SQL databases, documents and data – some misunderstandings

A good friend pointed me to this post: why you should never use MongoDB. It’s a very interesting post, about how bad MogoDB turned out to be for dealing with social network data. It’s not that MongoDB is bad per se, just … Continue reading

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, openehr | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Does anyone actually understand what terminology is for?

I really wonder sometimes. A few months ago, an international organisation that has been looking at how to solve the requirement for scalable, sustainable content modelling (research data sets) did some trialling on the use of archetypes. This worked fine … Continue reading

Posted in Health Informatics | Tagged , , | 11 Comments