On 17-02-12 14:39, Rene Spronk (Ringholm) wrote: > However, as Thomas points out, to state that openEHRs primary focus on > software design wouldn't do it justice: that's a means to an end. The > raison d'etre is achieving interoperability. Allow me to introduce my two cents.
For my personal point of view, the raison d'etre is the low costs involved with software design and change-design. To say it short, just create an archetype (and a GUI or other means of data-entry) and you are in business, when working in niches, this is a strong advantage. Then, when breaking out of the niche, when connecting to other systems, or devices, it is easy to write a layer to adapt to the data-constellations which are offered or wanted. When interoperability comes to it, via templates it is possible to come to all sort of message-formats or message-standards, the software-logic needed is less complicated then when in legacy-systems. I have some experience in working with message-layers for legacy. Very often, one has to forget all good habits of software-development. Many legacy systems have become ugly in software-code. That is why changes in legacy are often very expensive to implement and that is why, often, errors occur. OpenEHR offers a healthy base on which it is possible to keep your future software-extensions simple and clean. This is because, it happens all in the archetypes (and GUI's or other means of data-entry), not in the kernel. It is important to realize that the kernel-specifications have hardly changed for almost ten years. Compare this with a legacy-system where changes hack deep into all layers of code, even to the heart, the database-model. regards Bert Verhees
