Athanasios Anastasiou wrote: > Dear All > > My name is Athanasios Anastasiou and i am with the Signal Processing and > Multimedia Communications Research Group at the University of Plymouth, UK. > > The university is currently leading a 31 institutions partnership in a 4 > year European FP6 program called BIOPATTERN. More information can be > found in http://www.biopattern.org or our revised website at > http://www.biopattern.org/Test1 by following the link, "About the NoE." > > I have been reading the rather detailed specs documents of openEHR and i > believe that i am ready to take the plunge and actually implement a > proof-of-concept software making use of it. > > I am focusing on implementing a subset of the standard and before i > start i thought about posting some general questions that i have about > openEHR. > Hi Athanasios,
my first question is: what technology do you want to to work in? There is a lot of open source work already done in Java, Eiffel and .Net for openEHR which you can use. > 1. Is there a set of guidelines regarding the implementation > technologies used that make a piece of software "openEHR compliant?" > For example, the standard specifies that an openEHR repository should be > tracking the changes in the records. Is there a preffered implementation > for this or can i use whatever does the job? > What you are after is conformance criteria and tests, which have not yet been published. Conformance, the way we see it, can be tested only on concrete products, and is based on implementation technology specifications, such as the XML schemas, and (in the future) service interfaces. Currently, if your system can read and write data compliant to the published XML-schema for the reference model, and process ADL 1.4 archetypes, it would be minimally openEHR-compliant. We will develop test frameworks to perform detailed tests as time goes on and resources allow. > 2. The messaging section is blank (or so i think :-) ). So i am > wondering if there is a messaging pre-standard or other specification > about the exchange of messages specific to openEHR. If there is no such > a thing, should i rather assume that the corbamed or CEN standards cover > this section? > The openEHR EHR Extract specification will be published in its first draft in the next few weeks, and is significantly more powerful than the CEN specification, but contains a direct mapping to it. If you want a private draft, let me know. > 3. What exactly does the ehr_extract entity represents in everyday > medical practice? For example, does it refer to the EHR view that a > specialist defines? Does it represent the return results of a query > towards the repository? > Queries can return finer-grained results than an EHR Extract. An EHR Extract is designed for the results of queries for parts of health records, between two distinct EHR systems, usually in 2 care delivery enterprises - the idea is that the receiver system integrates the extract of the EHR it receives into its local copy of the health record for the patient in question; the results will then be visible to local user applications at the receiver end. > 4. Just to clarify something. As far as i understand it, binary files > from various modalities are stored as URIs to the underlying file system > (whatever that is). Is this correct? > If you mean things like CAT scan images, X-ray images and so on, yes, usually, these are stored in dedicated PACS, with links an thumbnails (or "normal" images for a typical desktop computer) embedded in the EHR. There are two reasons to do this. One is size and performance; secondly, the EHR usually needs the _report_ written by the radiologist or other specialist, plus a few diagnosticaly relevant images, whereas the PACS will contain the whole image set (for some time at least). > Finally, i would just like to point out that several links, over at > www.openehr.org that are supposed to be pointing to implementations or > implementation details are inoperable or incomplete for example: > I have fixed as many of these as I can, but as you might imagine, some things are disappearing due to age... - thomas beale -- ___________________________________________________________________________________ CTO Ocean Informatics (http://www.OceanInformatics.biz) Research Fellow, University College London (http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk) Chair Architectural Review Board, openEHR (http://www.openEHR.org)
