Re: HL7 too expensive, too complex and inconsistent
Thanks to Bert in bring this article to our attention. Although I
haven't
read every word, I did not see the reference that HL7 was too expensive.
To my knowledge, HL7 is the most widely used standard by the large
HIS/IT
vendors. I think some of the references to v2.x vs v3 were interesting.
It is true that v3 has yet to penetrate the US as far as messaging is
concerned. On the other hand, CDA - also a v3 standard is gaining
increasing use in the US. A number of health care facilities are using
CDA
to define notes/summaries in a number of clinical domains.
The discussion of open, open source, and openess is quite interesting.
I
believe that HL7 is open in the sense that anyone can particiapte in
creating the standards. It is closed in the sense that the standards it
creates have a price, altho relative low. HL7 look at integrating true
open source into is structure and finally decided the gains were not
worth
the effort. I participate in a couple of open source organizations, and
the openess is quite interesting, surprising and challenging.
I think the article is an excellent reference. I disagree with some
statements about HL7, but I doubt if anyone could write an article that
everyone would agree with all the content.
Ed Hammond
Koray Atalag
<koray@cs.aucklan
d.ac.nz>
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rg
Subject
Re: HL7 too expensive, too
complex
12/02/2008 09:10 and inconsistent
PM
Please respond to
For openEHR
clinical
discussions
<openehr-clinical
@openehr.org>
Hi Bert,
I just had a quick scan of the report but read the parts on HL7 and
openEHR carefully.
There are two issues I want to comment on:
1) In the HL7 part it says nearly half of the assessed end-users are
using HL7 (version not mentioned but it must be v2.x) and more
importantly 90% of respondents envisages HL7 to be important in future.
That implies a big plus for HL7.
2) The major issue is the focus on open source in openEHR part. The
report seriously lacks the main philosophy of openEHR here! openEHR is
all about open systems - not just open source (although is the case as
in other domains). I am not going to write long on these two paradigms
here but as a research fellow on open systems I feel kind of responsible
to put few words on it ;)
Open Systems vs. Open Source: The former is a broader concept which is
an effort to enable different IT systems to talk to each other without
much external effort and also have the capability of running on
different platforms; whereas the latter is all about making source code
of software publicly available and let other developers to read, change,
share and run the software without any limitations (in most cases
without any charge).
Open Systems requires us to conform to relevant open standards (such as
open specs of openEHR) and have publicly available and well documented
descriptions for interfaces, behaviour and file formats. As can be
inferred, it is perfectly possible to build open systems by using
closed-source. But âopennessâ is not an all or nothing paradigm
here;
there are levels. By using open source in developing open systems one
may ensure a higher degree of âopennessâ.
I will try to read more of the report - but "open systems" should be the
main focus. It is is a buzzword which I think may attract more vendors
and result in widespread implementations.
Cheers,
--
Koray Atalag, MD, Ph.D
Clinton Bedogni Research Fellow
The University of Auckland,
Department of Computer Science,
Private Bag 92019, Auckland 1142, New Zealand
Tel: +64 (9) 373 7599 ext. 87199
Fax: +64 (9) 308 2377
Email: koray@cs.auckland.ac.nz
Bert Verhees wrote:
> Says the European Commission
>
> (report:)
>
>
http://www.ebusiness-watch.org/studies/special_topics/2007/documents/Special-study_01-2008_ICT_health_standards.pdf
> (sorry previous was the bad english)
>
>
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> openEHR-clinical@openehr.org
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