Ian Haywood wrote: > > Andrew McIntyre wrote: > >> code sets that have been specified. Its the quality of implementation >> and not the standard. The labs have the ability to produce compliant >> messages, but given the current business model its the market that >> gives them the will to do it. > Agree with these points but would add that the standard is not as > well-drafted as it could be > and has multiple points of 'interpretion' where the programmer can do X or Y > and still be within the standard. > This is probably inevitable given the standard is a 'blue-sky' document: it's > not referring to a real implementation > > Again, as many others have, I make the call for a reference implementation
An **open source** reference implementation, licensed in a suitably liberal manner (eg BSD license), so that it can be dissected, studied and re-used without impediment by others, including vendors of proprietary products. We have to remember that the goal of health informatics is not to keep medical software vendors in business, nor is it to advance the ideals of free software (which would be better served by a GPL-licensed reference implementation). The goal to to improve health outcomes and improve efficiency, and the best way to achieve that is, as you point out, is to make a re-usable reference implementation (or implementations, in several popular programming languages) available. Cost to the tax-payer: perhaps a few million. Benefits to everyone from accelerated deployment of interoperable applications: a lot more than that, and in a very short time frame. Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
