Category Archives: Health Informatics

Towards a standard analysis of computable guidelines, clinical workflow, decision support and … the curly braces problem

Posted on 24/06/2020 by

Why don’t we have widespread clinical decision support (CDS), computable guidelines, clinical workflow (plans), and why don’t the pieces we do have talk to the health record? The first time I heard such challenges framed was around 2000, and even … Continue reading →

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FHIR Fixes – the choice construct part I

Posted on 09/03/2020 by

I have posted before on the FHIR ‘choice’ construct, particularly here, where I have explained the problems of the choice construct (essentially: it’s an ad hoc constraint construct that subverts the type system, and doesn’t belong in typed formalisms; none … Continue reading →

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FHIR fixes: why a type hierarchy would help

Posted on 14/11/2019 by

One of the principal reasons for why I and others are proposing (some) type hierarchy in the FHIR Admin resources is as follows (my earlier post on this). Working Groups (i.e. committees) building Resources are currently in the situation of … Continue reading →

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FHIR Fixes – the Observation.value problem

Posted on 12/09/2019 by

As described in some detail in this earlier post on the FHIR formalism, a number of FHIR Resources contain ‘choice’ attributes of the form attribute[x], such as the one shown above in Observation. These are mapped in the FHIR UML … Continue reading →

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Fixes for FHIR – the Admin Resources

Posted on 11/09/2019 by

In this post I revisit the issues with the FHIR Resources described in the earlier post – A FHIR experience: models or just definitions? To summarise: FHIR has no semantic inheritance, only a generic structural inheritance of Resources from abstract … Continue reading →

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Improving Process State Representation in FHIR

Posted on 08/06/2019 by

In this post I document further observations on the FHIR resources, made during the transcription of the DSTU4 FHIR resources to the BMM format used in openEHR, as described here. This post examines the definition of process state in FHIR … Continue reading →

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FHIR versus the EHR

Posted on 24/05/2019 by

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 →

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A FHIR Experience – the formalism

Posted on 08/05/2019 by

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

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

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 →

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