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 purpose of the upgrade was to improve the separation of class and type, and to greatly strengthen the semantics of generic types and classes.
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.
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 “Medical Informatics” funding scheme, and has as its goal (my bolding):
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 2011, due to ‘lack of adoption’.
Fast forward to 2018, and we see Apple, Amazon, Google and Uber making new e-Health plays. Initially each corporation will probably work from its strengths – retail delivery for Amazon, booking for Uber, data for Google, and devices for Apple. In the US at least, some of them will build their own healthcare providers for the workforce, and use the environment as a place to work on next-generation health IT solutions. Some challenges, particularly in the devices area, will undoubtedly see progress – there is no doubt that the tech giants do some things really well.
But I remain sceptical about overall success.
The REST API Team (Bostjan Lah, Erik Sundvall, Sebastian Iancu, Heath Frankel, Pablo Pazos, and others on the openEHR SEC and elsewhere) have made a 0.9.0 Release of the openEHR ITS (Implementation Technology Specifications) component, in order to make a pre-1.0.0 release of the REST APIs available for wider comment.
LINKS: The generated Apiary documentation can be found here, while the .apib files are here in Github (see mainly the includes directory).
I’ve been silent for a while, but luckily an excellent paper on one of my favourite topics – the open platform for e-health has appeared. It comes from the Apperta Foundation, and is called “Defining an Open Platform”; you can get the PDF and also comment here.
We’ve made a lot of progress since my last post on this topic. We have published a 1.0.0 version of the openEHR Task Planning specification, which will go into implementation immediately in the City of Moscow e-health project. The current version will certainly be changed by that experience, but we believe is good enough for use in implementation, having been reviewed and worked on by our development team, including people from Marand (provider of the Moscow EHR platform implementation), DIPS (largest EMR vendor in Norway) and others from Tieto (Finland) and Moscow.
We are currently looking at creating a visual language for it, of which the above diagram contains initial ideas for the TP conditional structures on the left, with BPMN equivalents on the right.
wolandscat