Category Archives: openehr

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 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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Why using HIT standards fails to achieve interoperability

Posted on 06/09/2019 by

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

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 →

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

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