Category Archives: standards

FHIR versus the EHR

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

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?

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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Why the NHS needs its own health-tech university

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

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Why NPfIT failed

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 | 9 Comments

Services Landscape for e-Health

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

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

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

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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Major German research project chooses openEHR

I just returned from Heidelberg, where another very successful ‘openEHR day’ was held, this time by the HiGHmed research consortium, with 100 attendees. HiGHmed is funded with 20m€ by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the … Continue reading

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Will the tech giants ever succeed at e-Health?

Amazon, Apple, and Google are all having another go at e-Health. But we have been here before: remember Microsoft HealthVault? It’s still around, and still hasn’t taken off. Google Health went live in 2008, but was retired at end of … Continue reading

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