Category Archives: Computing

The folly of the obsession with source code

Posted on 20/02/2015 by wolandscat

My favourite topic these days is the phenomenon of fundamentalist thinking. You don’t need to go to Iraq to find it, it’s all around us…. Recently I chanced upon a post entitled ‘Coding is not the new literacy’ by Chris … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, openehr, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Windows 8 Metro, high DPI screen chaos, and other epic fails of modern life

Posted on 28/12/2014 by wolandscat

Windows 8 – a Lesson in Corporate Schizophrenia Recently I moved up to a Dell XPS 15 (fast i7 machine) with Windows 8.1, from an old Dell with Windows 7. I am now, along with the rest of us, suffering … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing | 7 Comments

No SQL databases, documents and data – some misunderstandings

Posted on 06/11/2014 by wolandscat

A good friend pointed me to this post: why you should never use MongoDB. It’s a very interesting post, about how bad MogoDB turned out to be for dealing with social network data. It’s not that MongoDB is bad per se, just … Continue reading →

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

What is a ‘standard’: legislation or utilisation?

Posted on 25/10/2014 by wolandscat

Bert Verhees, a colleague from the openEHR community made this post recently to the openehr-technical mailing list: OpenEHR is not a standard, it is a formal specification. http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards.htm ISO, What is a standard: “A standard is a document that provides requirements, … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, openehr, standards | Tagged , , , , , , , | 14 Comments

Health interoperability standards are a pre-platform concept. Discuss.

Posted on 02/10/2014 by wolandscat

There is a growing recognition that we need an open platform concept to solve e-health interoperability and reuse problems. Some evidence of this I noted in my recent post ‘What is an open platform’, including various US-based cross vendor platform … Continue reading →

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

What is an ‘open platform’?

Posted on 07/05/2014 by wolandscat

The word ‘platform’ is starting to reach the same status as the word ‘internet’ – part of the bedrock, but many have no idea what it really is. In e-health particularly, ‘platform’ is often mixed up with ‘open source’, ‘APIs’ and ‘standards’ … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, standards | Tagged , , , | 12 Comments

Archetype unification proposal – node identifiers

Posted on 01/01/2014 by wolandscat

    happy new year and best wishes for 2014. I hope your new year’s day is a bright one (unless you live in the UK, in which case it’s a lost cause here today 😉 I have been working … Continue reading →

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

The real reason most software fails

Posted on 29/09/2013 by wolandscat

To my mind there is a problem in academia to do with where disciplines like ‘computer science’ (CS) and applications of computing sit.  Pure computer science is the study of computational theory and applications. It develops things like data structures, … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, Culture, Health Informatics, Philosophy | 8 Comments

Identifying complex knowledge artefacts

Posted on 24/04/2013 by wolandscat

Based on a lot of experience, thinking and gnashing of teeth of colleagues Ian McNicoll, Heather Leslie, Sebastian Garde who work on the Ocean Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM) product, as well as many others using archetypes and archetype tools more … Continue reading →

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

DCMs & archetypes – why we need 3 layers

Posted on 09/10/2012 by wolandscat

This post is inspired by a slightly out-of-control discussion among people in the CIMI group. It’s a good discussion. The latest question that has come up is whether a DCM (Detailed Clinical Model) is a ‘model of use’ (i.e. some … Continue reading →

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