Hi Fred, Apropos to Tom I'd say openEHR is also equally to do with software maintainability; thanks to the dual or multi-level modelling and model driven development. This is my main research area as well as open source software. I agree with Tom's comments that being open source by itself is not enough (for any software quality aspect I believe) and must be accompanied with open standards. If I was asked to explain openEHR to my mother I'd probably say: 'it is about getting information right in healthcare'. I usually find this statement as the starting point when talking to other audiences such as computer scientists and developers. Perhaps you'll find useful as well.
Cheers, -koray From: openehr-technical-bounces at openehr.org [mailto:openehr-technical-boun...@openehr.org] On Behalf Of fred trotter Sent: Saturday, 18 February 2012 1:27 p.m. To: For openEHR technical discussions Subject: Re: Meaningful Use and Beyond - O'Reilly press - errata Thomas, This is quit usable critique and I will certainly draw from it in future revisions of the work. You make the argument that OpenEHR is primarily for interoperability, and I can accept that fundamental argument. It is difficult to swallow however, when I hear the HL7 v3 wonks talking about how HL7 RIM is the solution to semantic interoperability. Are they confused or are you confused, because you are saying basically the same thing. From my perspective as in implementer it looks awefully like a blueray vs HDDVD war and it looks like OpenEHR is losing. But at the same time I keep hearing that HL7 RIM is "compatible" with and might be "merged" with HL7 RIM. Very confusing, and I have yet to see something compelling that can be done in OpenEHR that cannot be done with HL7 RIM. Having said that, HL7 RIM is a proprietary ontology/model and OpenEHR, is not. That gives OpenEHR some usefulness even as an alternative model. Is that where I should see the value? Here is an information model that delivers semantic interoperability but is not proprietary? On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 6:15 AM, Thomas Beale <thomas.beale at oceaninformatics.com<mailto:thomas.beale at oceaninformatics.com>> wrote: Hi Fred, I think you are missing the point. The key thing we are working on in openEHR is interoperability, not open source. Open source health applications have historically not made any difference to interoperability, intelligent computing or anything else - they are the same as closed source systems that don't do any of these things. This is not to say that they aren't better quality software / solutions in other ways - some are very nice. But in general they have the same proprietary data formats and service interfaces as commercial solutions (making such definitions openly available doesn't change anything). Solving interoperability and intelligence in e-health (as for other domains) is very hard indeed, and solutions based on simple approaches only have marginal benefit. What matters to clinical people and actual health delivery is interoperability, regardless of closed or open source: open standardised (= widely agreed) information models, service interfaces and knowledge formalisms. Of course open source, done the right way does have a lot to offer, and can make the economics better, but it doesn't specifically address the interoperability problem. What I think you will see in the future is intelligent health computing platforms based on openEHR, or something like it (as you noted, Tolven also does not have much penetration today, but it also is a sophisticated solution that takes semantic interoperability seriously). See the CIMI forum<http://informatics.mayo.edu/CIMI/index.php/London_2011> to get some idea of the international backing for knowledge-driven architecture. Without these kind of model-driven architectures, semantic interoperability will remain a dream, as will any serious industry around decision support, business intelligence and data-based medical research, and any other application wanting to use computable patient-centred health data. Because of the time it has taken to mature the openEHR - and other related, and even competing - health computing platforms, solutions based on these platforms are only just starting to make serious inroads. I have no problem with your view of openEHR in terms of limited penetration (today), but what I think would be a little more positive would be for the open source sector to actually take part in solving interoperability, rather than continuing to add to the problem. There are real synergies to be explored. Much of the new work in openEHR and related architectures is coming out open source. It would be great if existing open source health application developers were to get involved - e.g. by working with us and others (e.g. HL7 HSSP, IHE etc) on e-health service models<http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/spec/openEHR+Service+Model>. We on the other hand have a lot to learn about e-health applications. Finally, I would guess that e-health is about 10% of the way to a truly useful full-featured intelligent and open e-health platform of the future. That means that books like yours should potentially be educating readers on the likely future, not the status quo. - thomas -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20120220/a393d2ed/attachment.html>
