On 27 June, I ran a workshop at TOOLS 2011 in Zurich, entitled ‘Creating the new Eiffel Technology Community’. I did this at the invitation of Bertrand Meyer, the inventor of Eiffel and also the TOOLS conference programme chair.
Recent Comments
DCMs – can they look good AND be computable?
Let’s talk about mindmaps and archetypes. Mindmaps seem to be fuzzy and friendly – we need them because they are incredibly efficient at transmitting information to humans. Archetypes seem über-mathematical, but we need them to do proper model-based computing.
Detailed Clinical Models (DCMs) – some basic facts
The New Zealand e-health programme architecture task-force has published its Working Interoperability Reference Architecture blueprint document. With respect to the document and the comments posted (I tried to post myself, but the comment disappeared), it seems worth making a couple of points on DCMs, of whatever flavour. If a DCM is to be expressed in a way useful to building and managing health IT infrastructure, there are two possibilities. Continue reading
Posted in Health Informatics, openehr
Tagged archetype, DCM, e-health, HL7, openEHR, standards
5 Comments
Ontologies and information models: a uniting principle
Software developers and ontologists generally live in two different worlds. The former group think they are building systems to perform information processing and computation, and the latter group think they are formally describing some aspect of the world.
[Note: slight change to wording of FOPP on 30/May/2011]
Posted in Computing, Health Informatics
Tagged HL7, ontologies, software engineering, standards
9 Comments
The HL7 Null Flavor Debate – part 2
Previous: HL7 null flavors part 1
Null flavors – Objection #3: ontological problems
The following table shows the current HL7v3 null flavor values. A full version of the table appears in Grahame Grieve’s blog post. Continue reading
Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, openehr
Tagged data types, HL7, ISO 21090, models, openEHR, standards
4 Comments
The HL7 Null Flavor Debate – part 1
(With apologies to those who use international English and normally spell it as ‘flavour’; in this post, I will spell it properly in informal text, and in the US way when referring to the formal HL7 null flavour concept.)
Grahame Grieve has pointed out in a recent blog post that I am a major critic of HL7 ‘null flavours’. This is correct, but the reasons are probably misunderstood, so I will try to clarify here. Continue reading
Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, openehr
Tagged data types, HL7, ISO, ISO 21090, models, openEHR, standards
8 Comments
One information model to rule them all?
One of the age-old debates in health informatics: can there be ‘one information model’ for shared clinical information? Some dream of a model to rule them all, uniting standards efforts, while others dismiss the idea as impossible or unrealistic. Obviously inside deployed health/hospital information (and all other – lab, GP, nursing, billing, PAS etc) products, there are private, differing information models. These do not concern us. Continue reading
How could HL7 refresh?
Continuing on from the basis established in the previous post, here I will say what I think HL7 could do to help here. My suggestions are as follows: Continue reading
What needs fixing in e-health?
or, e-health seen through the prism of an ancient pantheon of gods…
Grahame Grieve’s recent blog entry on the HL7 Fresh Look Task Force seems a good excuse for me to have another big picture look at e-health. The fact that HL7 is doing this indicates two things at least: that it thinks something is wrong in the HL7 organisation, and that it thinks something is not going right in e-health in general. That’s good to see. HL7 has been the single most influential standards body in e-health for at least 15 years. It has spent massive effort in the last decade on an effort called HL7v3, or ‘version 3’. This effort has not been a resounding success, indeed the evidence indicates the opposite. I have historically been one of the strongest critics of the technical architecture of this effort, so my statements here won’t come as any surprise. To give credit where it is due however, I have come to see that HL7 was trying to the right kind of thing, just that they lacked the appropriate expertise to do it. Solving the challenges in the area of e-health is no mean feat, and maybe some of them are unsolvable, so take that statement as a commiseration rather than a criticism. Continue reading
Ruminations on ‘design’ in e-health
I have often bemoaned the state of standards for the e-health sector. Earlier posts provide details. The main argument is that the key specifications the sector needs are for interoperable data, information and knowledge, but that the main approach to getting these is via standards agencies, whose processes almost guarantee failure. Hence the ‘standards crisis’ in health informatics. The failure is not innate in standards agencies as such; it is just that standards agency committees in the e-health sector are doing the wrong thing. They are acting as de facto R&D fora rather than as a choosing mechanism on proven designs from industry. In my view (and experience) this is because among the members and leaders of those committees are almost no engineers, i.e. people who understand a) how standards actually work in other industries and b) that design is an essential element of what is being standardised. The consequence of the situation in e-health standards is ‘design-by-committee’.
