On Mon, 13 Nov 2000 00:08:53 Thomas Beale wrote:
...
>In a nutshell, for the OIO system to work as a GEHR server, it will need to have
>semantically equivalent ideas of TRANSACTION, ORGANISER, various kinds of CONTENT,
>and various DATA_VALUE types, and all the structural relationships between these.
>This is the object model GEHR servers agree to, and it is expressed both in
>Eiffel/UML, and also in an XML-schema document, which is how systems written in other
>technologies can understand it.
What about in terms of input / output equivalence? What if OIO can store, manipulate,
process, and output data according to GEHR archetypes?
...
>> The OIO now provides the "business logic" layer (forms) and a kernel that 1)
>renders the forms as web-forms, 2) builds database tables / fields according to the
>"forms", 3) import/export the forms as XML, and 4) archive the forms in online forms
>library server for upload/download. The web-forms can contain Java applets and can
>do client-side validation. There is an integrated "forms" editor, a "forms" manager
>(with version control), a patient/user ID manager, and a rudimentary data mining
>module. All these are built with Zope and are 100% browser-based.
>
>Hm. Then I think your "forms" are like class instance templates. Is there variability
>in the forms?
Yes, they are class definitions (or class instance template if you will). When a form
is filled out, an "instance" of the "form" is created. This maps directly to the
clinician's daily experience of pulling out a blank form and filling it out. The
blank form is an instance of the form. The "design" of the form is the class
definition. Forms are reproduced through photocopiers to make more blank
forms=instances. The reason to have "forms" is to allow *variability* in class
definitions. That is also why "forms" are metadata.
You are correct that I use the term "forms" not in a standard way. OIO forms do not
contain layout data, instead they are purely class definitions (=metadata). However,
they can be used by the OIO kernel to render "web-forms" that can be used to collect
data according to the definitions.
>> I talked to your colleague, Sam Heard, after the GEHR session last week at AMIA
>about our plans to manage "Reports" metadata in the same way that we manage our
>"forms" metadata. I am not sure if he understood what I was proposing.
>
>We need to study OIO. I have already listed it as a work item for a group to work on
>in our next funding round.
Well - in the meantime, thanks for allowing me to study GEHR. I am not convinced yet
that the model is all that complicated. From my reading of the docs on GEHR, it seems
very straight forward, elegant - and very similar to OIO. :-) Perhaps it is because
the two systems are so similar that I find the GEHR model very elegant and powerful!
I told Sam during the AMIA GEHR session that we may already have field-tested GEHR's
object model in an actual production system implemented through the OIO. I will be
very glad to give you additional details to help you understand how the OIO works.
If indeed it is true that OIO is a GEHR kernel (or nearly so), then this may
accelerate GEHR's development and perhaps save a few million dollars. Would that be a
good thing?
Andrew
---
Andrew P. Ho, M.D.
OIO: Open Infrastructure for Outcomes
www.TxOutcome.Org
Assistant Clinical Professor
Department of Psychiatry, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center
University of California, Los Angeles
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