Hi Philippe,
>From my point of view is the lack of communicable structure between
different EHR systems the main problem openEHR?s archetypes tries to solve.
I think this is what Mattias tries to say with his letter. In general
medical informatics is it of cause also a large need for medical terminology
systems of good quality, but openEHR?s archetypes don?t try to solve this
problem by themselves. Instead you are able to link your archetypes to the
medical terminology systems of the flavor you prefer, like SNOMED CT,
ICD-10, ICF, ICPC, NCSP or something built by yourself. (At least in Sweden
there exist maybe too many ?home built? medical terminology systems.)
Regards,
Mikael Nystr?m
Mattias? and Johan?s master thesis supervisor
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:owner-openehr-technical at openehr.org] On Behalf Of Philippe AMELINE
Sent: den 9 februari 2006 12:34
To: openehr-technical at openehr.org
Subject: Re: dictionary
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
>
>
>
