Tag Archives: standards

openEHR turns 20 today

openEHR was officially created on 13 March 2003, 20 years ago today. Prof David Ingram thought of the name, and he and a small band of optimists – Dr Sam Heard, Dr Dipak Kalra, David Lloyd and myself – launched … Continue reading

Posted in Computing, Health Informatics, openehr, standards | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Why using expressions in workflow is wrong

One of the basic elements of design common to all workflow languages, including YAWL and BPMN, is the inclusion of logical expressions on decision nodes. This seems harmless, and we followed it in openEHR’s Task Planning specifications. However, it is … Continue reading

Posted in openehr, standards, workflow | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

The Health IT Platform – a definition

Following on from various posts in the past, including my 2014 post What is an open platform?, I thought it might be time to post a succinct (as possible) definition of the platform idea, for e-health. As stated in that … Continue reading

Posted in Health Informatics, standards | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

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

Posted in Computing, openehr, Philosophy, standards | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

A FHIR experience: consistently inconsistent

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

The long slow death of UML

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

FHIR v openEHR – concreta

Some readers may have read my previous post FHIR compared to openEHR. If not, I recommend you do, it is available in Spanish, Japanese and Chinese as well as English. Here I aim to clarify some of the concrete differences … Continue reading

Posted in FHIR, Health Informatics, openehr | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

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

openEHR technical basics for HL7 and FHIR users

Recent discussions on the FHIR chat forum with various HL7 people around the topic of how openEHR and other architectural frameworks (e.g. VA FHIM, CDISC) could work with FHIR led to a realisation that some people in HL7 at least … Continue reading

Posted in Computing, FHIR, Health Informatics, openehr, standards | Tagged , , , , , , | 7 Comments

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

Posted in Computing, FHIR, Health Informatics, openehr, standards | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments