Author Archives: wolandscat

About wolandscat

I work on semantic architectures for interoperability of information systems. Much of my time is spent studying biomedical knowledge using methods from philosophy, particularly ontology and epistemology.

openEHR turns 20 today

Posted on 13/03/2023 by wolandscat

openEHR was officially created on 13 March 2003, 20 years ago today. Prof David Ingram thought of the name, and he and a small band of optimists – Dr Sam Heard, Dr Dipak Kalra, David Lloyd and myself – launched … Continue reading →

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

Why using expressions in workflow is wrong

Posted on 07/11/2022 by wolandscat

One of the basic elements of design common to all workflow languages, including YAWL and BPMN, is the inclusion of logical expressions on decision nodes. This seems harmless, and we followed it in openEHR’s Task Planning specifications. However, it is … Continue reading →

Posted in openehr, standards, workflow | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

A Lingua Franca for e-health takes shape with GraphiteHealth

Posted on 15/05/2022 by wolandscat

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 →

Posted in FHIR, Health Informatics, openehr, standards | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

The Health IT Platform – a definition

Posted on 14/05/2021 by wolandscat

Following on from various posts in the past, including my 2014 post What is an open platform?, I thought it might be time to post a succinct (as possible) definition of the platform idea, for e-health. As stated in that … Continue reading →

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

What is interoperability?

Posted on 17/04/2021 by wolandscat

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

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, openehr, standards | Tagged | 6 Comments

Directions in clinical guideline programming – CHA2DS2-VASc

Posted on 29/03/2021 by wolandscat

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

Design-by-Contract (DbC) v Test-Driven Design (TDD)

Posted on 04/03/2021 by wolandscat

Another bit of software engineering knowledge from my archive relates to two well-known formal quality methods used in software development. This is from a presentation made at ETH Zurich in 2010.

Posted in Computing | 8 Comments

Software – from Development to Use and Ownership

Posted on 03/03/2021 by wolandscat

Here’s an infographic (alright, it’s just a diagram) I created over a decade ago, randomly extracted from the archives. I think it’s almost self-explanatory. Here’s a few more slides using this. I wouldn’t adjust too much today, but note that … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Nominalism versus Ontology

Posted on 03/03/2021 by wolandscat

Most nominalist arguments are straightforwardly wrong, but not for the usual reasons that universals and/or abstracta are said by realists to exist, but for the opposite reason: types and abstracta are ‘just there’, even if they don’t ‘exist’, in the sense of being spatio-temporally concretised. The real problem is that we misuse the word ‘exists’ at least half the time in philosophy. Continue reading →

Posted in Philosophy | Tagged | 3 Comments

Aide Memoire for Computable Domain Models

Posted on 16/02/2021 by wolandscat

Sometimes a graphic is worth more than words. This is an attempt to capture all the salient features of multi-level modelling, the openEHR way. See the openEHR primer for the story. Although this is ‘our way’ of doing it, I … Continue reading →

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