Hi all, I have been following discussions on your lists for a year now and I have been triggered from the post of Evelyn about Health Information and Integration Platform ontology to send my comments on ER health modeling.
My quest for ER models in the health domain started a year ago when I decided to migrate a neurosurgery clinical database that I have developed as a legacy EMR system and use international health standards for coding the data. http://athanassios.gr/neurohealis.htm I thought it would be easy to find a suitable schema from health standards organizations and open EHR/EMR software to migrate my data but this is exactly the point where I realized that schemas I studied where either too complicate to read and implement or very limited. Perhaps this is why there are hardly any implemented open RDBMS based on well defined extensive ER health model. This observation gave birth to MEDILIG project. http://sourceforge.net/projects/medilig/ MEDILIG is currently a personal effort to implement a simple but extensive ER model that can be implemented easily with popular databases such as MSQL server, MySQL, Oracle and build EHR or other clinical systems on top of it. I have been studying openEHR archetypes and NHS data model to use values for lookup tables I have in MEDILIG schema. What I find most intuitive with openEHR is the idea for modeling archetypes and templates. But one can be easily lost with the data details and structure, hence the need for navigation through the model. Although there are several health standards around for coding I do not think there has been any agreement on what is going to be the standard ER model to use and I believe that this might be a key reason why professionals from both clinical and IT sector find difficulties in communicating effectively. You need to refer to an ontology map such as those used at NCBO. http://bioportal.bioontology.org/ To support further my arguments I attach for your convenience ER models for HL7, NHS, openEHR and MEDILIG. http://cid-abb3ba8f2878f50f.office.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/ER%20Models.zi p (please let me know if you have problems with the link) Perhaps one can start an open discussion at a blog for a COMPARISON of them. If you study MEDILIG ontology you will notice that there are very few core entities and most of the other entities are used like attributes with values taken from international health coding standards. I think that this is a useful distinction for future ER models. In case you are aware of publications on that topic or discussions, please do advise me accordingly. Hope to have your feedback/comments for my point of view My best wishes to all Athanassios I. Hatzis, PhD http://healis.gr http://athanassios.gr
