To add fuel to your intuition the LabInfo project has also come to the
conclusion that workflow is a key component.
Joseph
----- Original Message -----
From: "Wayne Wilson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2000 4:10 PM
Subject: Re: Principles of Open Source Health Care (was: Anybody using
VistA?)
> "Alvin B. Marcelo" wrote:
> >
> >
> > I agree Wayne. The 3rd Visible Human conference ended last week and one
of
> > the speaker's comments on standardization struck me:
> >
> > He said: "All healthcare is local."... I expect the same will occur with
> > medical information systems. The information requirements of end-users
> > [except those required to be submitted by law] vary widely.
> >
> > Acknowldeging this, how then should we approach the work to be done by
the
> > alliance? Where is the common ground?
> >
> I am not that pessimistic about localization. Having discussed business
> practices with my UK colleagues, I was struck by how much their business
> needs (versus clinical care needs, which I know less about) were the
> same as the one's we face in the US. There is a stiking difference in
> who pays, but the underlying information needs are virtually identical.
> That lead me to thinking about common process's and the notion that
> application's are just expressions of those process's. So we need are a
> rich set of process's and a highly expressible building architecture.
> Workflow orientation seems a natural. That way, local practices are
> just different assemblies of the same process's into various workflows.
>
> Andrew Ho also said this in a different way when he said "a modular
> architecture with clear
> separation of interface, business logic, and underlying implementation
> (to render and support the interface and logic)".
>
> On the related thread of vendor lockin and switching costs, Hal Varian
> (formerly of Michigan Economics Dept. and now Dean, School of
> Information Management and Systems UC Berkeley) has done a lot of work
> on the electronic economy, pricing models and switching costs. In
> general you can find Hal's work here:
>
> http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/papers.html
>
> In particular you might want to look at these:
>
> Locked In, Not Locked Out
> http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,2173,00.htm
>
> Economic Incentives in Software Design
> http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/Software.pdf
>
>
