Category Archives: openehr

Why using HIT standards fails to achieve interoperability

I started working in the Health IT area in 1994, on a major European Commission funded project. I attended years of standards meetings at HL7, CEN and occasionally OMG and ISO from 1999 to about 2012. And I’ve observed the … Continue reading

Posted in Computing, openehr, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Improving Process State Representation in FHIR

In this post I document further observations on the FHIR resources, made during the transcription of the DSTU4 FHIR resources to the BMM format used in openEHR, as described here. This post examines the definition of process state in FHIR … Continue reading

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FHIR versus the EHR

One of the many things the FHIR silver bullet hype claims FHIR will solve is the EHR, along with Clinical Decision Support (CDS), Care Pathways, and who knows, paving driveways and launching spacecraft. I have made various arguments against silver … Continue reading

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openEHR Task Planning – a visual model of clinical workflow

We have been making steady progress on the openEHR Task Planning specification and visual modelling language (TP-VML) for clinical workflow. One of the differentiators of Task Planning, is that, like YAWL, it is designed as a formalism for developing fully … Continue reading

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Why the NHS needs its own health-tech university

The NHS has around one million employees and serves most people in England and Wales. We could easily imagine a slightly larger organisation serving the whole UK, although for historical reasons Scotland and Northern Ireland are separate. Another large public … Continue reading

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

The long slow death of UML

The Unified Modelling Language aka UML has been around for 22 years, as you can see from the OMG UML page. We use it extensively to publish the openEHR specifications, in a similar way to many other organisations. Developers often … Continue reading

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Why NPfIT failed

Below is my list of reasons why I think NPfIT failed. NPfIT was the NHS National Programme for IT in health, starting in 2002, with Richard Grainger appointed as NHS IT director. A timeline is published here. NPfIT is generally … Continue reading

Posted in Health Informatics, openehr, Politics, standards | 9 Comments

Services Landscape for e-Health

Every so often I get bored of what I am doing and start trying to draw one of those ‘services roadmap’ kind of diagrams for e-Health. These pretty pictures appear in slide presentations, standards, whitepapers etc, but are not often … Continue reading

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

FHIR v openEHR – concreta

Some readers may have read my previous post FHIR compared to openEHR. If not, I recommend you do, it is available in Spanish, Japanese and Chinese as well as English. Here I aim to clarify some of the concrete differences … Continue reading

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Why the platform will replace today’s interoperability standards in healthcare

For decades, most of us working in health informatics and e-health have lived on the assumption that ‘interoperability’ is one of the main things we are trying to achieve, and that it is the most important because the lack of … Continue reading

Posted in Computing, FHIR, Health Informatics, openehr | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments