See http://www.ehiprimarycare.com/comment_and_analysis/index.cfm?ID=197
Interesting snippets: a) "The demo included the first public sight of tools for improved clinical note taking, that include automatic prompting to allow notes to be coded with appropriate SNOMED CT codes at the point of capture. A vital step in the development of electronic patient records, and providing clinical knowledge support at the point of care. The aim explained Andrew Kirby, Microsoft's head of the CUI programme is to ensure consistent note taking with meta tags included." b) "In addition an NHS Abbreviations Manager has been created that will automatically ask the user covered by an abbreviation that they type and ask them to code it appropriately. Microsoft is also looking to see whether adding and NHS spellchecker is also possible." c) "The project includes two main strands, a Design Guide which describes how things should be done and the NHS Software Development Kit that provides the components for ISVs to easily turn the Guide into software. Kirby said that clinical ISVs can now freely take components from the NHS Software Development Kit and incorporate them into their software. 'This builds on the Microsoft approach of common controls, basic building blocks that allow you to do things very rapidly.'" a) and b) are clearly cognate with what Jon Patrick has been working on with respect to SNOMED CT and other encoding and tagging of clinical free text. If Jon's unit were funded to produce a fully-developed open source implementation of this, then Australia could reap many, many benefits. <cynicism>Or we could just wait and buy the technology from Microsoft (part of the UK NHS/Microsoft collaboration is that Microsoft is encouraged to flog the technologies elsewhere, with some royalties flowing back to the NHS coffers). After all, we're only good at growing stuff and digging stuff up in this country. And brewing beer, sort of.</cynicism> c) is interesting because it is an example of a very large govt agency saying "We need to give the local software industry both direction and assistance, so we'll fund freely available (at least freely available within the context of the UK health system) reference implementations and re-usable components to give them a leg-up and to herd them in a common direction, while still allowing innovation and entrepreneurship." Very smart indeed. What isn't so smart is their choice of Microsoft as the partner in this, and the complete lock-in to the Microsoft software universe that results, nor the restriction of the availability of the technologies and components to NHS approved ISPs. Needless to say, open sourced reference implementations and re-usable components would have been a much better idea in the long term. But the general idea of funding development of software components is a good one, rather than just spewing forth 500 page standards documents in the sublime hope that the local health software industry will implement them. NEHTA, please take note! Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
