Bert Verhees wrote: > It is said in > http://www.openehr.org/getting_started/t_openehr_primer.htm that one > of the disadvantages of current health-care information systems is the > costs and difficulties to maintain them. > Having to delete data manually, and thereby having to regard > DB-vendor-specifics, OpenEhr-implementor-specifics and > OpenEhr-version-specifics makes, in my opinion Openehr, regarding this > issue costly and difficult, and even dangerous to maintian. I think, I > would never advise some implementor doing this. perhaps I am missing something. openEHR simply provides a logical versioning model that supports many semantics, including logical deletion. Physical deletion cannot be expressed in that kind of model - the semantics of physical deletion are by definition at the file system or some similar level. > > It is also said on the same webpage that the OpenEhr community is > growing, and has members of many countries. One can conclude from this > that OpenEhr has the desire to not be nation-specific, and should have > features which are needed (f.e. for repairing an errorneous post of > data), or even in a minority (f.e. to be local law compliant) of the > community. > > So not having a proper "removal of patients-data or even a complete > patient"-record API is in my opinion opposite against some of the > OpenEhr goals. no, that's not the intention; in fact we already have in the APIs being used in Australia the possibility to split one EHR into two EHRs due to wrong patient data going into an EHR, and also to merge two EHRs. openEHR itself doesn't say anything at all about the semantics of removing an entire patient, since it doesn't define formally the idea of "collection of EHRs", only single EHRs.
- thomas beale
