Re: HL7 too expensive, too complex and inconsistent

[Thomas Beale <thomas.beale@oceaninformatics.com>]

The report was done based on a survey of 94 responding 'experts', 
whoever they were. They didn't get openEHR at all, and made some errors 
to do with other standards orgs in the report. I don't see open source 
as a burning issue - open data and open (service) interfaces are what 
matter to clinical users (particularly secondary - medical research & 
public health) and system vendors respectively. Open source is a nice 
development paradigm - but mainly for software where the developers are 
more or less the same pool of people as the users - hence Linux, Samba, 
Apache, Zope, and all the other big projects. Health software is 
specialised and to make open source fly it needs to be funded and 
directed in my view - hence the Open Health Tools (OHT) initiative. 
Based on the evidence to date, anyone who thinks that organic open 
source EMR or other projects are going to magically solve e-health 
interoperability is dreaming.

Ed's comment about not wanting to spend the effort on open source 
directly in HL7 reflects this reality (and I think it was most likely 
the correct decision). openEHR's open source projects only solve 
interoperability problems because they are 100% based on the open 
specifications (i.e. some kind of standard), not because they are open 
source.

- thomas beale


William E Hammond wrote:
> 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
>
>   
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