Category Archives: Health Informatics

Fixes for FHIR – the Admin Resources

Posted on 11/09/2019 by wolandscat

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 →

Posted in FHIR, Health Informatics, standards | 5 Comments

Improving Process State Representation in FHIR

Posted on 08/06/2019 by wolandscat

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 →

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

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 →

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

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 →

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

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 →

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

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 →

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

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