Dear Thomas,

Are there any documents that one could already look at regarding the rule-based 
Entry Index you mention below?

Sincerely,
Nadim


Nadim Anani, MSc, PhD student
Centrum f?r h?lsoinformatik / Health Informatics Centre (HIC)
LIME
Karolinska Institutet
SE-17177 Stockholm, Sweden

________________________________
From: openehr-technical-bounces at openehr.org 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Thomas Beale
Sent: den 16 december 2011 13:52
To: openehr-technical at openehr.org
Subject: Re: 13606 revisited - list proposal

On 16/12/2011 11:06, Erik Sundvall wrote:





if you want to truly bi-directionally share things ...

the semantics of the end point systems will need to be aligned sooner

or later.



Anyway it wouldn't hurt if a new or refreshed internationally

recognized standard could be used by those vendors and system owners

that actually _want_ to agree on the internal clinical semantics of

efficiently implementable systems all the way down to some of the

technical (e.g. openEHR inspired) details. I think there is now a

market for such a standard (or new standard part) helping those that

have given up beliefs in mapping of incompatible semantics.

Although openEHR is designed for aligning semantics of the data inside and 
between systems, real sytems/products are not so much deficient in this area 
(well, actually they usually are) as focussing on higher levels of computing, 
such as medication list management, prescription tracking, care plan management 
and so on. They generally have to implement such things with hard-wired logic 
and dedicated DB tables etc because there is no generalised data architecture 
that provides the platform for such functionality.

In the standards arena, we have to deal with these upper levels of 
functionality at some point, but doing so will be easier having defined a 
'proper' data architecture (I don't mean to say today's version is perfect, 
just that it is probably in the right ballpark of structure/semantics to 
support upper layers of logic).

One of the forthcoming proposals we have been working on for some time is a 
generalised rule-based 'Entry Index' system which enables higher level 
structures like medication lists and care plans to be completely specified in 
terms of the low level openEHR Entry types we know today (or whatever they 
become). This facility is based on AQL rule patterns and output notifications / 
events, so it is a higher level of sophistication than what currently exists in 
openEHR.

I foresee such tings (the above is just one example) being slowly standardised, 
in a flexible way, so that one day medication lists, doctor's appointment 
schedules and patient care plans can be widely shared across products and 
jurisdictions. Secondly, decision support and business intelligence will 
finally have something solid to work on. In my view, that is the real promise 
of openEHR. The current models are just a foundation.







I suspect this is an intentional difference between current 13606 and

openEHR; to faithfully capture the current (incompatible) situation

versus aiming to change the current situation.  Can those different

goals really meet in one RM or do we need two standardized RMs?

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-08-02/

I should perhaps point out that openEHR has a perfectly usable generic Entry 
type<http://www.openehr.org/uml/release-1.0.1/Browsable/_9_5_1_76d0249_1140530578205_529440_4046Report.html>
 that does the same as 13606 Entry. This Entry type is designed for weakly 
structured data.

I would suggest that it is not an argument between inside-system logic V 
between system logic, but that there is a continuum of structure+semantics, and 
our models have to cater for that. Some otherwise primitive systems happen to 
be very good at time-series data (e.g. most vital signs monitors) and creating 
openEHR Observations in messages for these data sources is in fact easy. So 
Observation is not specifically an 'inside-system' concept, just a standardised 
way of representing time-series data that is useful for sharing information.


Could one add a new part (13606 part-6 or 1b?) to the specification containing 
detailed RM semantics (inspired by openEHR) and at the same time align that new 
part and a more general "healthcare a-specific" model (a revised 13606 
part-1(a)?)

that could be a useful idea.

There are other probably more important challenges in the current 13606 though. 
I have put a few notes 
here<http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/spec/openEHR+%7E+13606+2012+revision+-+alignment+proposals>.

- thomas
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: 
<http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20120117/96dbac38/attachment.html>

Reply via email to