Category Archives: Health Informatics

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 →

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

openEHR Task Planning – a visual model of clinical workflow

Posted on 17/04/2019 by

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

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

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 , , | 1 Comment

Why NPfIT failed

Posted on 28/10/2018 by

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

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

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

Why the platform will replace today’s interoperability standards in healthcare

Posted on 21/07/2018 by

For decades, most of us working in health informatics and e-health have lived on the assumption that ‘interoperability’ is one of the main things we are trying to achieve, and that it is the most important because the lack of … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, FHIR, Health Informatics, openehr, standards | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

openEHR Basic Meta-Model (BMM) and syntax major upgrade

Posted on 16/07/2018 by

The openEHR Basic Meta-Model (BMM) that has been in use in some form for nearly 10 years now was recently upgraded to version 3.0.0 (from 2.x), with the persistence format (now called P_BMM) being backwards-compatibly upgraded to version 2.3. The … Continue reading →

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Standards or toilet paper? A Linus Torvalds reality check

Posted on 22/06/2018 by

Linus Torvalds, rightly praised for his literary flair and subtlety, serves up a classic today, on the topic of standards and when to just forget about them.

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