On Sun, 14 Sep 2003, Thomas Beale wrote:no, it will cost them a few $m (we wanted to eat;-)
...
there are projects already happening - one under consideration is an
Australian government funded one which could lead to a national EHR
infrastructure
Thomas, Would you tell us more about this Australian government-funded project? In particular, is it going to be free?
possibly in some form by mid next year (this is the trial I am talking of - not the whole country); definitely during the 12 months following that.When is it expected to go to production?
well, I think it is - it depends on what your detailed criteria for "portable medical records" are I suppose...- so I don't think nothing at all will happen, but overall I agree - the
OS community is very important. The timetable (see
http://www.openehr.org/active.htm) is this: we want to get a 0.9 release
out the door in the next 8 weeks.
Is the 0.9 version of openEHR adequate for ensuring portable medical records?
It will be.Is the Australian government-funded implementation (that you mentioned above) based on openEHR 0.9?
not quite - the current version is actually solid enough to use; the issue is not whether it is descriptive enough in and of itself, but how it relates to standards, which in Europe's case might be a legislated requirement (this is CEN ENV 13606 I am talking about here).I am presently in Europe to push this along. The 0.9 release will be
solid enough for widespread implementation
What do you mean by "solid enough"?
I think the most important feature is whether 0.9 is sufficient to ensure portability. Whether or not it is sufficiently descriptive is another question - which is not as critical - as long as you can help us understand what the limitations are.
...well, they made a research tool that ran on Windows. It is unfair to be too negative about such a tool when it was one of the first of its kind in the world (actually - it was the second - Dipak Kalra's group at UCL made the first at least a year or 2 earlier). Given that we were all learning, it was a reasonable attempt (not funded either).
Another thing which has to be done is that the DSTC will (I hope!)
contribute an XML implementation spec to help people use openEHR in XML,
schema etc.
DSTC makes proprietary, Windows-based, buggy :-) versions of openEHR archetype editor etc. Why should we count on them to give us a stable, XML-based openEHR interface?
Ocean Informatics is in the process of developing a couple of ADL tools, one clinical, the other technical. They will be released open source. We aren't building an XML-based interface however, XML is just one way of saving the archetypes - it's nothing to do with semantics of the archetype language.
Has DSTC changed their business model recently?in what way?
I'm not sure - probably not. Free products which are not being used in production probably won't care about official certification - e.g. if they are for teaching or whatever. If they are used in production, they should be paid for - nothing like that can be for free. In whcih case certification (possibly government paid for) would be needed. But there is no reason why a university would not be able to do the certification proces itself - just that it won't be officially recognised (certification is about independent review, not secrecy).the way to do this is with pay-for compliance - you pay a bit and some
testing is done on the product, then you get the right to use the
"openEHR 1.0-compliant" sticker...
Do you plan to offer free testing and certification for free software products?
- thomas
