Category Archives: standards

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: However, there are changes that can be made that will greatly improve these characteristics, … Continue reading →

Posted in FHIR, Health Informatics, standards | 5 Comments

Why using HIT standards fails to achieve interoperability

Posted on 06/09/2019 by wolandscat

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 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 →

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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 →

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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

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 , , | 3 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 | 9 Comments