Hi Mattias, The more I work on medical information systems, and the less I believe that the structure is more important than the terminology.
To be a little bit more accurate, my opinion is that any health information system is there to "tell stories". I started in the domain 20 years ago with endoscopy reports : the story to tell was a 10 to 20 minutes medical act. Now, for many reasons (but it would be too long to explain it there), the "big thing" is continuity of care, and the challenge is to be able to tell someone's whole medical journey. So, how can we tell these stories (from a 10 minutes encounter to the whole life and the fighting strategies to remain as healthy as possible) ? The answer is rather simple (at least to express) : we need to make "sentences". And to make sentences requires a grammar (the discourse structure) and a vocabulary (to populate the discourse structure). Is it possible to have a discourse structure that can "host" any terminology ? My personal answer is 'no', but maybe I try to tell more complex stories than you intend, or maybe you have a more powerful technological solution. At large, I can ask you a question : do you think that you could communicate using the english grammar and let people choose any other language's vocabulary to populate it ? You can answer that natural language is more complex that formal language, but I can say that the more complex the story you intend to tell and the closer they need to be. Regards, Philippe > The important thing in openEHR archetypes is the structure of them. As > long as there is a structure that is equal for both "Weight" and > "Bodyweight", it shouldn't be a problem. The allowed information model > structures in archetypes is what really matters and the terms can > always be bound to external terminologies to create a mutual > understanding. > > Regards, > > Mattias Forss > > >
