Category Archives: standards

A FHIR Experience – the formalism

This post continues the review presented in the previous post, where I looked at the Administrative resources of FHIR. Here I take a look at the formalism used in FHIR, i.e. how the resources (and profiles) are formally expressed. FHIR … Continue reading

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A FHIR experience: models or just definitions?

This is a second instalment of a technical review of the HL7 FHIR resources. As described in the previous post, this review is the result of an element-by-element transcription of the FHIR DSTU4 resources to the openEHR BMM (Basic-meta Model) … 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

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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

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openEHR Basic Meta-Model (BMM) and syntax major upgrade

The openEHR Basic Meta-Model (BMM) that has been in use in some form for nearly 10 years now was recently upgraded to version 3.0.0 (from 2.x), with the persistence format (now called P_BMM) being backwards-compatibly upgraded to version 2.3. The … Continue reading

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Standards or toilet paper? A Linus Torvalds reality check

Linus Torvalds, rightly praised for his literary flair and subtlety, serves up a classic today, on the topic of standards and when to just forget about them.

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Major German research project chooses openEHR

I just returned from Heidelberg, where another very successful ‘openEHR day’ was held, this time by the HiGHmed research consortium, with 100 attendees. HiGHmed is funded with 20m€ by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the … Continue reading

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Will the tech giants ever succeed at e-Health?

Amazon, Apple, and Google are all having another go at e-Health. But we have been here before: remember Microsoft HealthVault? It’s still around, and still hasn’t taken off. Google Health went live in 2008, but was retired at end of … Continue reading

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The open e-health platform, coming to an economy near you

I’ve been silent for a while, but luckily an excellent paper on one of my favourite topics – the open platform for e-health has appeared. It comes from the Apperta Foundation, and is called “Defining an Open Platform”; you can get … Continue reading

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