Category Archives: standards

A Lingua Franca for e-health takes shape with GraphiteHealth

Colleagues in e-health often say to me: why don’t you make openEHR easier to map to <insert popular interop standard> (used to be HL7v3, then HL7 CDA, now, HL7 FHIR… DSTU2/3/4/5?). To which I usually reply: if you are implying … Continue reading

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What is interoperability?

There are some rather obscure definitions of health IT’s favourite term interoperability floating around, for example:

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Directions in clinical guideline programming – CHA2DS2-VASc

The above shows a typical web form calculator for the CHA2DS2-VASc score, used for estimating the risk of stroke in patients with non-rheumatic atrial fibrillation (AF), primarily for the purpose of deciding the use of anti-coagulant therapy [Wikipedia]. How would such … Continue reading

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

Clinical Decision Logic Fun

How close can we get to making a clinical decision logic language look like the published guidelines which it is used to encode? Below is an openEHR Decision Logic Module (DLM) example, in the current form of the openEHR Decision … Continue reading

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Towards a standard analysis of computable guidelines, clinical workflow, decision support and … the curly braces problem

Why don’t we have widespread clinical decision support (CDS), computable guidelines, clinical workflow (plans), and why don’t the pieces we do have talk to the health record? The first time I heard such challenges framed was around 2000, and even … Continue reading

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FHIR fixes: why a type hierarchy would help

One of the principal reasons for why I and others are proposing (some) type hierarchy in the FHIR Admin resources is as follows (my earlier post on this). Working Groups (i.e. committees) building Resources are currently in the situation of … Continue reading

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FHIR Fixes – the Observation.value problem

As described in some detail in this earlier post on the FHIR formalism, a number of FHIR Resources contain ‘choice’ attributes of the form attribute[x], such as the one shown above in Observation. These are mapped in the FHIR UML … Continue reading

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Fixes for FHIR – the Admin Resources

In this post I revisit the issues with the FHIR Resources described in the earlier post – A FHIR experience: models or just definitions? To summarise: However, there are changes that can be made that will greatly improve these characteristics, … Continue reading

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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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