A FHIR Experience – the formalism

Posted on 08/05/2019 by

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 resources are described in terms of a custom formalism expressed as hierarchical tables. The appearance of a resource, along with the elements of the ‘language’ is shown above.

It has to be said in passing that the FHIR website and various visualisations, linking etc is a masterpiece of content-driven presentation.

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A FHIR experience: models or just definitions?

Posted on 06/05/2019 by

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) format for the purpose of model analysis and archetyping. Here I look at the Administrative domain. Continue reading →

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A FHIR experience: consistently inconsistent

Posted on 05/05/2019 by

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 the diagramming), with a fully formal definition. It has been in use since 2009 within the openEHR ADL Workbench, since about 2011 in HL7 CIMI, and since about 2016 in openEHR Archie (ADL2/BMM libraries and tools) and commercial tools including Marand ADL-designer and Veratech LinkEHR.

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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 executable process plans. This means that all the semantics of a TP Plan are formally defined and executable in a TP engine. It also means that the accompanying visual language, TP-VML, consists of visual elements formally related to the TP model. This is in contrast with BPMN, which is defined as a diagramming language with some formal elements mixed in, and other formal requirements expressed separately in the specification. Nonetheless, we are carefully studying the semantics of OMG’s BPMN2 / CMMN / DMN specifications to make sure we cover the necessary requirements, and use the same conceptual terminology as far as possible.

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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 healthcare organisation is the Veteran’s Administration, which manages around 160 veterans hospitals and countless clinics in the US. Brazil has an organisation called SUS – the universal healthcare system – which provides public sector care for 160m people not on private care. Smaller countries have similar, generally large, organisations, at least by the standards of each country. Large private organisations such as Kaiser Permanente and Partners Healthcare are in the same position, with the same needs.

There has been an endless search by such organisations over the 25 years I have been involved in e-health for the silver bullet to solve their IT challenge.

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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 use it for whiteboard brain-storming. But hardly anyone uses it for its original purpose: formal modelling of software leading to code, ideally with round-tripping. And this is despite the availability of excellent UML tools. Architects these days tend to limit their use of UML to package diagrams and a few illustrative class diagrams, while developers tend to go straight to code or use tools that pretty-print extracted textual forms of software such as swagger and apiary.

In openEHR, we publish specifications, so graphical representation of formal models is important. UML is still the only widely used graphical format, so we use it. However, to get around all its problems, I had to develop an alternative for static models, called Basic Meta-Model (BMM), to enable correct formal model representation for our tooling. This was not done lightly – we had to do it because UML does not represent the developer view of models correctly, and that’s the one we want. Worse, its serial form, XMI, is unreliable and unusable by humans or tools other then the creating UML tool. We also developed a UML extractor for the UML tool we use, to fix some of the problems it has, so we know a thing or two about UML under the covers. I have no doubt other organisations have resorted to similar fixes.

A few years ago I asked 8 senior software engineers at a meeting who was using a UML tool in their development work. A total of zero hands went up. And yet humans love pictures, so we should be using some sort of graphical modelling language. What went wrong for UML?

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Why NPfIT failed

Posted on 28/10/2018 by
(from Campion-Awwad, Hayton, Smith and Vuaran, 2014)
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 conceded to have spent £10.7bn by the government in 2013, when it was definitively shutdown. Claims have been made that slightly more than this was delivered in value. Realistic analyses such as the one linked to from the image at the top of this post show that the realised benefits are miniscule. Right now, the benefits for ‘Choose and Book’ can probably also be written off, as it is no longer generally used. I would guess the only benefits that those in the industry would agree were actually realised are N3, the secure NHS network and possibly NHS mail. The Spine supplies some benefits, but is so badly designed and over-complicated that it will undoubtedly be completely replaced in the next 5 years. Continue reading →
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