Bert Verhees wrote: >Hi, > >Thomas Beale asked me to write more to this mailinglist, and I have an >important issue to discuss. > >Last thursday, I had a meeting wherein Thomas was present, in fact, it >was education about EN13606. After a whole day of talking, by Thomas, >he really did a good job. I noticed there was no mention about GPICs, >and I asked Thomas, how GPICs fitted in his story. He said to my >surprise, that they didn't. GPICs were in fact, obsoleet. But one could >still use them to migrate data to an archetype-ready data layer. > > Looks like I have to clarify somewhat! Here is my take on GPICs: - GPICs are approximately an equivalent of HL7 CMETs, but developed for European use - as such, they define reusable parts of messages - messages are defined in advance, essentially as hardwired definitions of packets of information to be sent between two systems. - In contrast, EN13606 is defined as a generic approach to carrying information, with the semantics defined in archetypes, and applied flexibly at runtime. - Thus, EN13606 does not use GPICs directly, apart from a small number of demographic ones which have been replicated in the UML of the demographic part of the 13606 part 1 model. However, it is expected that any GPICs deemed useful for EHR systems will be re-engineered into archetypes. - note also that the scope of messaging is generally wider than the EHR, i.e. there are messages for communications which we do not desire to put in the EHR, e..g fine-grained ordering and workflow events, many admin and billing events and so on. So EN13606 would not be used in such situations (of course, if we were starting from scratch in this area, we would use the generic information model + archetype approach for such things, but we are not - there is much implementation already based on the message paradigm).
So in summary, I don't see GPICs as being obsolete. They are not used directly in EN13606, but rather in various messages being defined in Europe. >I was shocked, how is it possible that in silence a 400 pages part of a >standard can be declared obsoleet. One throws away many many years of >expensive work. Not only the standardisation comitee which must have >worked for years on this, but also work from early adapters like me. > >I understand that it is better to change half way than to proceed in >error. But if such an important change takes place, one will want to >know how it is possible that such an erroneous large part (400 pages, >200 classes) of the standard can exist for so many years, and does not >get critized publically. Something serious must be wrong somewhere. > > It may be interesting to get a better idea of who are the users of GPICs - I don't know the answer to that, but I think it might be a relevant question for you and other implementors of them. >What also seems very strange to me, I discussed a GPIC >SubjectOfInvestigation with Edward Glueck and Tom Marley on 25 may >2005, I discussed GPICs with Gerard Freriks on 4 jun 2005. No mention >about the fact that GPICs are obsoleet, or will be obsoleet in a few >weeks from then. > > No-one is saying that (or thinking that) - they just are part of the message world that's all. Also, the work done on the GPICs will not be lost - even if they are converted to archetypes, the modelling work has already been done - archetypes will merely be capturing the semantics already there, while removing irrelevant message-related attributes. - thomas beale - If you have any questions about using this list, please send a message to d.lloyd at openehr.org
