Category Archives: Health Informatics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, standards | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

openEHR REST API 0.9.0 out for comment

The REST API Team (Bostjan Lah, Erik Sundvall, Sebastian Iancu, Heath Frankel, Pablo Pazos, and others on the openEHR SEC and elsewhere) have made a 0.9.0 Release of the openEHR ITS (Implementation Technology Specifications) component, in order to make a pre-1.0.0 release … Continue reading

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