Category Archives: Computing

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

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 →

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Clinical Decision Logic Fun

Posted on 22/10/2020 by wolandscat

How close can we get to making a clinical decision logic language look like the published guidelines which it is used to encode? Below is an openEHR Decision Logic Module (DLM) example, in the current form of the openEHR Decision … Continue reading →

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Why using HIT standards fails to achieve interoperability

Posted on 06/09/2019 by wolandscat

I started working in the Health IT area in 1994, on a major European Commission funded project. I attended years of standards meetings at HL7, CEN and occasionally OMG and ISO from 1999 to about 2012. And I’ve observed the … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, openehr, Philosophy, standards | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

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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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 →

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