David Guest wrote: >> The data is identified as such and grouped in a hierarchy. But its >> description and constraints are entirely open and undefined. I guess >> its a useful lowest common denominator > > Does anyone think openEHR will ever produce the goods?
There has been correspondence on the openhealth mailing list regarding this issue recently. David More quipped about "geological timescales", perhaps with some justification. To summarise and paraphrase (accuratey I hope) the thread: the openEHR people assure us that several private firms are using openEHR-based systems in deployed proprietary vertical health apps, and that lots of profs and students in various universities are studying and tinkering with it. The openEHR specifications have been accepted as a proposed standard (but not ratified or approved as a standard as yet). Furthermore, Ocean Informatics and the openEHR Foundation are themselves working on a suite of tools which actually implement the ideas behind openEHR, but these tools are in different stages of completeness: tools to define and edit openEHR archetype definitions are complete and available as open source. Tools to actually store and retrieve data using openEHR archetypes are at alpha or beta stages in the openEHR secret laboratory, but have not been fully tested and are not ready for production use. Thomas Beale has offered access to an openEHR engine hosted in the Ocean Informatics labs, to be accessed via a proprietary Web service interface requiring the use of a Microsoft C# .NET DLL on the client side, for capability-testing purposes by interested parties (contact Thomas Beale at Ocean Informatics if you are interested). All these openEHR tools still under development may or may not be open sourced in the future - the Ocean Informatics and openEHR people need to investigate business models. Other parts of the openEHR puzzle, such as a shared library of openEHR archetype definitions, and a full query language, are still on the drawing board or in only early stages of implementation. Oh, there is also an open source version of an openEHR storage/retrieval kernel being written in Sweden, but it is not yet complete either. I asked the same questions of the Ocean Informatics and openEHR people in 2003, and after much email correspondence and head scratching, I was assured that usable, production-quality openEHR implementations would be available quite soon. The same assurances were given just a few weeks ago. I conclude that they are indeed a bit further along now with actual implementation than they were three years ago, but still have quite a way to go, but it is very hard to extrapolate the progress line to divine when it might cross the V1.0 boundary, although the fact that they were working on GEHR (the predecessor to openEHR) about 15 years ago, and the openEHR has been going for nearly a decade might provide some clues. Perhaps the remaining distance is being halved with every passing year? Or perhaps I am just a cynical bastard? Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
