I will be attending a ‘Fresh Look’ meeting in Washington next week. The idea is to make some progress on the topic of ‘detailed clinical models’ (DCMs). Some of the goals include setting up a repository of DCMs, establishing governance, and defining a roadmap for tooling. Underlying all this is a huge list of formalisms and models, including OWL, UML, ADL, HL7 MIF, XSD, LRA, RMIMs, CDA templates, greenCDA and so on.
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On 27 June, I ran a workshop at TOOLS 2011 in Zurich, entitled ‘Creating the new Eiffel Technology Community’. I did this at the invitation of Bertrand Meyer, the inventor of Eiffel and also the TOOLS conference programme chair.
Let’s talk about mindmaps and archetypes. Mindmaps seem to be fuzzy and friendly – we need them because they are incredibly efficient at transmitting information to humans. Archetypes seem über-mathematical, but we need them to do proper model-based computing.
The New Zealand e-health programme architecture task-force has published its Working Interoperability Reference Architecture blueprint document. With respect to the document and the comments posted (I tried to post myself, but the comment disappeared), it seems worth making a couple of points on DCMs, of whatever flavour. If a DCM is to be expressed in a way useful to building and managing health IT infrastructure, there are two possibilities. Continue reading
Software developers and ontologists generally live in two different worlds. The former group think they are building systems to perform information processing and computation, and the latter group think they are formally describing some aspect of the world.
[Note: slight change to wording of FOPP on 30/May/2011]
Previous: HL7 null flavors part 1
The following table shows the current HL7v3 null flavor values. A full version of the table appears in Grahame Grieve’s blog post. Continue reading
(With apologies to those who use international English and normally spell it as ‘flavour’; in this post, I will spell it properly in informal text, and in the US way when referring to the formal HL7 null flavour concept.)
Grahame Grieve has pointed out in a recent blog post that I am a major critic of HL7 ‘null flavours’. This is correct, but the reasons are probably misunderstood, so I will try to clarify here. Continue reading
One of the age-old debates in health informatics: can there be ‘one information model’ for shared clinical information? Some dream of a model to rule them all, uniting standards efforts, while others dismiss the idea as impossible or unrealistic. Obviously inside deployed health/hospital information (and all other – lab, GP, nursing, billing, PAS etc) products, there are private, differing information models. These do not concern us. Continue reading
Continuing on from the basis established in the previous post, here I will say what I think HL7 could do to help here. My suggestions are as follows: Continue reading
Grahame Grieve’s recent blog entry on the HL7 Fresh Look Task Force seems a good excuse for me to have another big picture look at e-health. The fact that HL7 is doing this indicates two things at least: that it thinks something is wrong in the HL7 organisation, and that it thinks something is not going right in e-health in general. That’s good to see. HL7 has been the single most influential standards body in e-health for at least 15 years. It has spent massive effort in the last decade on an effort called HL7v3, or ‘version 3’. This effort has not been a resounding success, indeed the evidence indicates the opposite. I have historically been one of the strongest critics of the technical architecture of this effort, so my statements here won’t come as any surprise. To give credit where it is due however, I have come to see that HL7 was trying to the right kind of thing, just that they lacked the appropriate expertise to do it. Solving the challenges in the area of e-health is no mean feat, and maybe some of them are unsolvable, so take that statement as a commiseration rather than a criticism. Continue reading
