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.

FHIR versus the EHR

Posted on 24/05/2019 by wolandscat

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 →

Posted in FHIR, Health Informatics, openehr, standards | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

A FHIR Experience – the formalism

Posted on 08/05/2019 by wolandscat

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?

Posted on 06/05/2019 by wolandscat

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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A FHIR experience: consistently inconsistent

Posted on 05/05/2019 by wolandscat

In recent work I am involved in, the HL7 FHIR DSTU4 resources were converted to the openEHR formalism known as Basic Meta-Model (BMM), which is published as an open specification. BMM is an object-oriented formalism, conceptually similar to UML (minus … Continue reading →

Posted in FHIR, Health Informatics, standards | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

openEHR Task Planning – a visual model of clinical workflow

Posted on 17/04/2019 by wolandscat

We have been making steady progress on the openEHR Task Planning specification and visual modelling language (TP-VML) for clinical workflow. One of the differentiators of Task Planning, is that, like YAWL, it is designed as a formalism for developing fully … Continue reading →

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Why the NHS needs its own health-tech university

Posted on 06/04/2019 by wolandscat

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 →

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

The long slow death of UML

Posted on 07/03/2019 by wolandscat

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 →

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Why NPfIT failed

Posted on 28/10/2018 by wolandscat

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 | 8 Comments

Services Landscape for e-Health

Posted on 23/10/2018 by wolandscat

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

Posted on 10/10/2018 by wolandscat

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