Category Archives: openehr

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

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

What is a ‘standard’: legislation or utilisation?

Bert Verhees, a colleague from the openEHR community made this post recently to the openehr-technical mailing list: OpenEHR is not a standard, it is a formal specification. http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards.htm ISO, What is a standard: “A standard is a document that provides requirements, … Continue reading

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, openehr | Tagged , , , , , , | 14 Comments

openEHR 2014 Roadmap Meeting, Sep 16/17, Oslo

Last week saw the first major face-to-face international openEHR community meeting, which took place in Lilletstrom, near Oslo, at premises kindly organised by DIPS asa, openEHR Industry Partner and major EHR supplier in Norway.

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Evaluating e-health standards II – governance and commercial aspects

Following on from my post yesterday, Grahame Grieve commented that I had not dealt with issues of stability and commercial acceptability. I had not originally intended to do that, but on reflection, he is right – a standard that is … Continue reading

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Beyond the hype: evaluating e-health standards

A new e-health standard comes along every couple of years. In Gartner hype cycle terms, it starts out on the rise toward the ‘peak of inflated expectations’, then falls into the ‘trough of disillusionment’, before either dying or rising again … Continue reading

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ONC Hearing on the JASON Report – openEHR perspective

Recently I was asked to provide testimony to the ONC hearings on the JASON report, from an openEHR point of view. I did so on 31 July 2014. The JASON report is entitled “A Robust Health Data Infrastructure”. It surveys the problems … Continue reading

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Why clinical models are essential to big data

I attended HIMSS 2014 in the mammoth convention centre in Orlando 10 days ago, and went to a session on ‘Clinical Decision Support – is progress being made?’. Despite this being the dead Thursday of HIMSS, around 50 people showed … Continue reading

Posted in Health Informatics, openehr | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment