Hi, I've been following the "Dual Model EHR implementation" discussion and it just occurred to me that all these approaches would make much more sense if they have been accompanied by sample clinical data, databases open to the public. Scientifically speaking one has to test any method with data to judge efficiency, etc...
Something which is also very true in most cases is that in most EHR systems a specific database modeling, implementation approach has been chosen due to limited resources, (time and money) and other specific conditions of the problem domain and application field. Presumably there is a huge gap between commercial systems and scientific/educational/open systems. It is also true that database modeling and other issues are part of the information management systems domain (including content management, ERP, knowledge management, information modeling, information retrieval etc...). I am just trying to make the point that : If we are studying IMPLEMENTATION/DEVELOPMENT OF GLOBAL INFORMATION MODELS in e-health or more generally speaking trying to apply information science theories in the medical field then we need A LOT OF DATA to test it. Data that are open to the public (e.g. open data foundation, open data commons) etc... As Tim Berners-Lee says it does not matter in what format, just put the data on the web and people will find ways to work with it. In that respect there has to be global repository with clinical data of any form, (fictional demographics, clinical documents, admissions, procedures, etc). Ideally there should be some correlation with anonymous patients at the center. All this human effort of international groups like HL7 or openEHR make much more sense if anonymous clinical data are open to the public. This is the only way in my opinion to promote both information science and clinical research, to promote the medical field. Kind regards Athanassios http://healis.eu http://medilig.org PS: Perhaps researchers in this field can point us to such open clinical data already available ????
