Dear Bert, On behalf of the founding fathers of openEHR, with the longest memory and record of its evolution from the early nineties, this is just to say thank you for your Thanksgiving Day Hallelujah - best Leonard Cohen style, no doubt! I have to say, slightly ruefully, that if, as you suggest, we were entrepreneurially driven, then we were somewhat mad to be so - a 20 year start up is not seen as good business in the modern era, I fear!
Not for nothing did we describe the three top priorities of openEHR as implementation, implementation and implementation, mindful of its very steep learning curve as it was always very steep for us, too. The implementers, and we should include the clinical data modellers as well as the software developers in that term, are the heroes of the transformation that is coming in health care IT, as a modular and interoperable architecture gains currency, as it inevitably will. It's with great pride that we see different and independent foci of openEHR implementation growing apace in Western Europe, where it all started, Central and Eastern Europe, Asia and the Far East, Australasia, South America, and no doubt elsewhere as well, since most hits to the web site historically have come from North America. In my new parallel world in OpenEyes, we are seeing its open source applications beginning to spread and take root, similarly widely. It was one of the privileges of my career to meet and correspond with Octo Barnett when he was transforming health care IT and I was a PhD student travelling the world to meet the founders of the field. In MUMPS he created a new database paradigm for its time, informed by the practical needs of medicine and inspired too by his concern for medical education. In the New Pathways programme at Harvard, as well, which was one of the early initiatives exploring how innovation was changing the nature and craft of medicine, and therefore how new students needed to be taught and learn differently, he showed the talents of visionary, doughty pioneer and craftsman that are needed to turn the world upside down. It's a good tradition and example for the implementers of today to seek to follow. I'm confident that openEHR is in safe new hands and is not going away. As always, it's there to play and support whatever roles seem most fitting, as the modular ecosystem of digital care records, that health care sorely needs, comes into being. Thanks again for your kind words and best wishes, David (Ingram) So think beyond that. That is one of the good things of the designers of OpenEHR, and more, the designers of the side effects, like AOM, which are important beyond the boundary of OpenEHR. Today is thanksgiving? Let us thank those people for their wonderful work which started about in the beginning of this millennium, or even in the end of the previous millennium. They designed an eco-system without having a technical reference to build it. They showed the courage of Henry Ford. They were inventing technical solutions, instead of conforming to technical solutions of the that time current which is now the past. I know, through the years, people struggled a lot with how to implement it. And I know, most of them do not admit that. Every implementor has to solve his own secret problems. OpenEHR is not an open developer-community, but it is a community of entrepreneurs which all want to be the number one. What would have happened if OpenEHR was designed conforming the technical possibilities of 1999, would we still have been talking about it right now? OK, enough of hallelujah. ---------------------------- What's next.... - Tooling is good, but tooling is always situation/platform depending. It is not a fundamental solution. - Simplification in order to solve technical problems is conforming to the past and is not a good way. We need to think deeper about this. I did not get in this any further then the path/value combinations, and in succession, the short path notation (which makes it in fact more complicated). Bert -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/pipermail/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20131128/bd7cc2ef/attachment.html>
