Tag Archives: ISO

Why using HIT standards fails to achieve interoperability

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

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Why the platform will replace today’s interoperability standards in healthcare

For decades, most of us working in health informatics and e-health have lived on the assumption that ‘interoperability’ is one of the main things we are trying to achieve, and that it is the most important because the lack of … Continue reading

Posted in Computing, FHIR, Health Informatics, openehr, standards | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

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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e-Health standards – beyond the message mentality

[a monk’s retreat near Thalori village] I just spent a few days in Crete at an experts workshop of the European e-Standards project that aims to bridge well-known gaps in e-health standards and SDOs. I’ll comment on that effort in … Continue reading

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What is a ‘standard’: legislation or utilisation?

Bert Verhees, a colleague from the openEHR community made this post recently to the openehr-technical mailing list: OpenEHR is not a standard, it is a formal specification. http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards.htm ISO, What is a standard: “A standard is a document that provides requirements, … Continue reading

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Evaluating e-health standards II – governance and commercial aspects

Following on from my post yesterday, Grahame Grieve commented that I had not dealt with issues of stability and commercial acceptability. I had not originally intended to do that, but on reflection, he is right – a standard that is … Continue reading

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Beyond the hype: evaluating e-health standards

A new e-health standard comes along every couple of years. In Gartner hype cycle terms, it starts out on the rise toward the ‘peak of inflated expectations’, then falls into the ‘trough of disillusionment’, before either dying or rising again … Continue reading

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DCM – Data Types and Reference Model considerations

Following the DCM meeting convened by Dr Stan Huff (Intermountain Healthcare) in Washington in July, reported in an earlier blog post, there is a further meeting this week in San Diego, which will discuss the issues of ‘data types’ and … Continue reading

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The HL7 Null Flavor Debate – part 1

(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 … Continue reading

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The crisis in e-health standards III – solutions

Prev: The crisis in e-health standards IIa Stakeholder Aspirations and Needs Before going so far as to offer a solution to the e-health standards problem, I want to have a look at what we consider to be the requirements that … Continue reading

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