I am getting mixed signals from what Tom is saying.
I am not sure if he is suggesting that Health IT (as in EHR/EMR, DSS,
CPOE, etc.) should go through the same rigorous government controlled
testing that drugs and biomedical equipment go through? Or, if he is
saying that "an" implementation proves usefulness? I think that there
is a good case for the former. Sure it would increase costs, but at
least they would work as advertised. 
--Tim
Might want to re-think that one Tom. Can we start with DARPA?
--Tim
DARPA doesn’t “do” anything. DARPA sets goals, offers money, and lets the smartest people compete to achieve the goals.
Hi Thomas,
My opinion is the grade of adoption of a standard depend in some aspects of goverment agencies, in some of the industry and some of the academy.
DICOM is a good example of an open standard heavily supported by the industry, that’s the point of it success. Can’t be OpenEHR a de-facto standard for EHRs? Like DICOM is for imaging. I think yes, but the progress of OpenEHR to solve real the problems and make it usable, is slow.
I think OpenEHR is strong on the academy area. It has poor industry penetration (I mean enterprises developing tools and aplying a good part of the OpenEHR specification in their systems, and that these systems where used in some hospitals). I don’t know what’s the penetration of OpenEHR on goverment agencies. There are some open tools but there is some stillness on making improvements on them.
For example, here in Latin America, almost nobody knows about OpenEHR in the industry area, and very very few knows about it in the academy area.
There are some ideas that may help de difusion and adoption of OpenEHR:
I think that regional OpenEHR communities are needed to empower the adoption and spreading of the standard. In 2009 I send a message to the mailing lists, but I get no answer from the community (this mail is below). Now we have 36 members from Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Spain, and more. They work on goverment agencies, big enterprises (like IBM), developers and physicians. I think the international OpenEHR community needs to support these regional communities, providing guidelines, general objectives, and following their work. Here in South America, only few people know about OpenEHR, that’s a shame. People in goverment are making decissions, without knowing that are good and open standards out there.
Formal training and education in OpenEHR is needed. It’s very hard to the newcomer to understand how to use OpenEHR, and people interested on the main ideas of OpenEHR may be dissapointed when they try to use it in a real-world software application. People in the industry must be trained, but how many OpenEHR trainers are out there?
In Set-2010 I’ve done a hands-on OpenEHR tutorial in Argentina, and people (medics and TIC people) where amazed about building their archetypes and having a tool that generates the EHR (this is my degree project). This was done in the context of the “Argentine Congress of informatics and Health 2010”. Now, the organizers want to make more time to discuss OpenEHR and its posibilities. This is just an example that great things can happen if someone has interest.
Regional OpenEHR communities can build courses fucused on the regional needs, may be made some money to support the open tool development (*).
Building and supporting open tools. The current tools have no regular updates. We need developers to build new tools and improve the current tools. We can use the money of the training courses (*) to pay developers to do this job. If this depends only on the free time we have, tools just can die before they are implemented.
In order to help any goverment adoption of OpenEHR, the decission makers have some questions that today OpenEHR can’t answer.
What is the state of the standard?
Is it stable?
Wich parts are stable?
Is there any return of investment study done on efective use of OpenEHR?
Or just, how much time and money I have to spend to effectively use OpenEHR in a real world application? (I have to train people to make things happen, not in an investigation project, but in a production project)
What real world products are using OpenEHR?
How these products are using OpenEHR? (they adopt the RM? the AOM? the SM?)
There is page on “who is using OpenEHR” in the portal, but it is outdated. My proposal is to do regular polls on the community in order to know: who is working on what, and how they’re using OpenEHR.
I think there are very good posibilities in the OpenEHR adoption on the industry adn goverment areas, but we need to build improve the lines of action of the community to reach that.
Just my humble opinions.
Best regards,
Hi Pablo
I think that there is beginning to be serious industry penetration in many parts of the world. We are seeing this in the Asia Pacific region as well as many countries across Europe. I think that we will soon start to see a lot more interest in South America as well - certainly there is more than academic interest in Chile and Brazil I believe.
I think that we will start to see a growing number of enterprise development tools - there are certainly a number of commercial and open source development platforms that are available now and are quite mature.
regards Hugh
Hi Hugh,
I think that there is beginning to be serious industry penetration
in many parts of the world. We are seeing this in the Asia Pacific
region as well as many countries across Europe.
Do you have any concrete examples? I mean, do you know who is working on what?
As I say, we need to make some polls to know what people is working, where are this people, and how they are using OpenEHR.
With this information updated we can set links between projects and improve collaboration.
In Brazil there is work on 13606, and some work on OpenEHR, but now they want to make their own standard based on OpenEHR.
In Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia and some other countries here in South Amercia, nobody knows more than the name of OpenEHR, and that’s a shame.
I think that we will soon start to see a lot more interest in
South America as well - certainly there is more than academic
interest in Chile and Brazil I believe.
Is the OpenEHR boards doing something for this to happen? Or this is just a feeling?
I think real actions must take place here to reach success.
I think that we will start to see a growing number of
enterprise development tools - there are certainly a
number of commercial and open source development platforms
that are available now and are quite mature.
What are those tools you mentions? How do you know they are mature?
There are tools, I use them, 1. some have a lot of problems, 2. some are not being updated for a while.
I don’t want to sound rude, but with feelings and thoughts we can’t convince goverments to look at OpenEHR,
we need facts and numbers. Soon or later we must focus on “formalize” this standard.
I’m convinced that we need regional groups to focus on regional needs, with action lines provided
by the international community. This will empower the standard all around the globe, but we need support.
Cheers,
Pablo.
http://informatica-medica.blogspot.com/
Hi Thomas,
My opinion is the grade of adoption of a standard depend in some aspects of goverment agencies, in some of the industry and some of the academy.
DICOM is a good example of an open standard heavily supported by the industry, that’s the point of it success. Can’t be OpenEHR a de-facto standard for EHRs? Like DICOM is for imaging. I think yes, but the progress of OpenEHR to solve real the problems and make it usable, is slow.
I think OpenEHR is strong on the academy area. It has poor industry penetration (I mean enterprises developing tools and aplying a good part of the OpenEHR specification in their systems, and that these systems where used in some hospitals). I don’t know what’s the penetration of OpenEHR on goverment agencies. There are some open tools but there is some stillness on making improvements on them.
For example, here in Latin America, almost nobody knows about OpenEHR in the industry area, and very very few knows about it in the academy area.
There are some ideas that may help de difusion and adoption of OpenEHR:
I think that regional OpenEHR communities are needed to empower the adoption and spreading of the standard. In 2009 I send a message to the mailing lists, but I get no answer from the community (this mail is below). Now we have 36 members from Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Spain, and more. They work on goverment agencies, big enterprises (like IBM), developers and physicians. I think the international OpenEHR community needs to support these regional communities, providing guidelines, general objectives, and following their work. Here in South America, only few people know about OpenEHR, that’s a shame. People in goverment are making decissions, without knowing that are good and open standards out there.
Formal training and education in OpenEHR is needed. It’s very hard to the newcomer to understand how to use OpenEHR, and people interested on the main ideas of OpenEHR may be dissapointed when they try to use it in a real-world software application. People in the industry must be trained, but how many OpenEHR trainers are out there?
not enough yet 
But there are two things that will improve the situation:
In Set-2010 I’ve done a hands-on OpenEHR tutorial in Argentina, and people (medics and TIC people) where amazed about building their archetypes and having a tool that generates the EHR (this is my degree project). This was done in the context of the “Argentine Congress of informatics and Health 2010”. Now, the organizers want to make more time to discuss OpenEHR and its posibilities. This is just an example that great things can happen if someone has interest.
Regional OpenEHR communities can build courses fucused on the regional needs, may be made some money to support the open tool development (*).
this is the key; to get the money, authorities need to be convinced it is a) going to do what they need and b) not going to isolate them. They are very scared of the second, even though it is not rational (since most of the standards in their comfort zone really don’t work that well, and not at all together).
- Building and supporting open tools. The current tools have no regular updates. We need developers to build new tools and improve the current tools. We can use the money of the training courses (*) to pay developers to do this job. If this depends only on the free time we have, tools just can die before they are implemented.
actually, the ADL workbench and Archetype Editor are constantly being updated. However, I only just realised that the link for the latter is not visible. I will look into this.
- In order to help any goverment adoption of OpenEHR, the decission makers have some questions that today OpenEHR can’t answer.
- What is the state of the standard?
- Is it stable?
- Wich parts are stable?
should be fairly clear from the release page, http://www.openehr.org/releases/1.0.2/roadmap.html
- Is there any return of investment study done on efective use of OpenEHR?
that’s a harder question
- Or just, how much time and money I have to spend to effectively use OpenEHR in a real world application? (I have to train people to make things happen, not in an investigation project, but in a production project)
- What real world products are using OpenEHR?
- How these products are using OpenEHR? (they adopt the RM? the AOM? the SM?)
There is page on “who is using OpenEHR” in the portal, but it is outdated. My proposal is to do regular polls on the community in order to know: who is working on what, and how they’re using OpenEHR.
more up to date information would be good, however the information there is not more than about 18months out of date, and in some cases more recent. However, there is much activity that has no entry at all in these pages - it would be good to obtain information on that.
- Formal links with “formal” SDOs are needed. I think that OMG is in tune with the way OpenEHR do things. They have the COAS standard, and OpenEHR RM is mapped to COAS. This is a good starting point to have something in common.
in fact, there are ongoing talks with IHTSDO about close cooperation and development. Making someting happen in the ‘official’ standards space is the key. Currently, many governments have been too scared to go away from the official standards, even though they have had little success with them
I think there are very good posibilities in the OpenEHR adoption on the industry adn goverment areas, but we need to build improve the lines of action of the community to reach that.
agree.
Hi Thomas,
My opinion is the grade of adoption of a standard depend in some aspects of goverment agencies, in some of the industry and some of the academy.
DICOM is a good example of an open standard heavily supported by the industry, that’s the point of it success. Can’t be OpenEHR a de-facto standard for EHRs? Like DICOM is for imaging. I think yes, but the progress of OpenEHR to solve real the problems and make it usable, is slow.
I think OpenEHR is strong on the academy area. It has poor industry penetration (I mean enterprises developing tools and aplying a good part of the OpenEHR specification in their systems, and that these systems where used in some hospitals). I don’t know what’s the penetration of OpenEHR on goverment agencies. There are some open tools but there is some stillness on making improvements on them.
For example, here in Latin America, almost nobody knows about OpenEHR in the industry area, and very very few knows about it in the academy area.
There are some ideas that may help the difusion and adoption of OpenEHR:
I think that regional OpenEHR communities are needed to empower the adoption and spreading of the standard. In 2009 I send a message to the mailing lists, but I get no answer from the community (this mail is below). Now we have 36 members from Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Spain, and more. They work on goverment agencies, big enterprises (like IBM), developers and physicians. I think the international OpenEHR community needs to support these regional communities, providing guidelines, general objectives, and following their work. Here in South America, only few people know about OpenEHR, that’s a shame. People in goverment are making decissions, without knowing that are good and open standards out there.
Formal training and education in OpenEHR is needed. It’s very hard to the newcomer to understand how to use OpenEHR, and people interested on the main ideas of OpenEHR may be dissapointed when they try to use it in a real-world software application. People in the industry must be trained, but how many OpenEHR trainers are out there?
In Set-2010 I’ve done a hands-on OpenEHR tutorial in Argentina, and people (medics and TIC people) where amazed about building their archetypes and having a tool that generates the EHR (this is my degree project). This was done in the context of the “Argentine Congress of informatics and Health 2010”. Now, the organizers want to make more time to discuss OpenEHR and its posibilities. This is just an example that great things can happen if someone has interest.
Regional OpenEHR communities can build courses fucused on the regional needs, may be made some money to support the open tool development (*).
Building and supporting open tools. The current tools have no regular updates. We need developers to build new tools and improve the current tools. We can use the money of the training courses (*) to pay developers to do this job. If this depends only on the free time we have, tools just can die before they are implemented.
In order to help any goverment adoption of OpenEHR, the decission makers have some questions that today OpenEHR can’t answer.
What is the state of the standard?
Is it stable?
Wich parts are stable?
Is there any return of investment study done on efective use of OpenEHR?
Or just, how much time and money I have to spend to effectively use OpenEHR in a real world application? (I have to train people to make things happen, not in an investigation project, but in a production project)
What real world products are using OpenEHR?
How these products are using OpenEHR? (they adopt the RM? the AOM? the SM?)
There is page on “who is using OpenEHR” in the portal, but it is outdated. My proposal is to do regular polls on the community in order to know: who is working on what, and how they’re using OpenEHR.
I think there are very good posibilities in the OpenEHR adoption on the industry adn goverment areas, but we need to build improve the lines of action of the community to reach that.
Just my humble opinions.
Best regards,
ATT00001 (177 Bytes)
Dear All,
I think Pablo has a very pertinent point. Theory and armchair discussions are good, but applicability in real life situations, and painlessly, is the need of the hour.
If I were an implementor I would need a (no nonsense) ‘openEHR for dummies’, an SDK, sample code, a ready out-of-the-box installation with all the components in place (probably in ISO format) and a HUGE FAQ.
End of the day, what a guy need for his requirement - is what he actually need - nothing more, nothing less.
I am sure, somewhere in the www, many of these components do exist. Now it would be nice if we could get it all together on a single page.
With warm regards,
Dr D Lavanian
MBBS,MD
CEO and MD
HCIT Consultant
www.hcitconsultant.com
Certified HL7 Specialist
Member- American Medical Informatics Association
Member HIMSS
Senior Consultant and Domain Expert - Healthcare Informatics and TeleHealth
Former Vice President - Healthcare Products, Bilcare Ltd
Former Vice President - Software Division, AxSys Healthtech Ltd
Former Co-convener Sub committee on Standards , Governmental Task force for Telemedicine
Former Vice President - Telemedicine (Technical), Apollo Hospitals Group
Former Deputy Director Medical Services, Indian Air Force
Office: +91 20 32345045
Mobile: +91-9970921266
dear Lavanian. Nice to hear from u after a long time. Agreed about the need for practical and deplouable models. Curremtly open EHR is perceived as an academic theoretical exercise by many IT savvy doctors in UK. There is als a lack in clarity on who is the right recepient of this. Is it product companies is it the clinician. Is it the healrh informatics teams. Thanks
Dr. Shivam. MS FRCS
Head Clinical Transformation
Royal Free Hospitals
Dr. Shivam.
00447814708199
Pablo does make some good points. That is why I started the OSHIP
project instead of just sticking with an RM implmentation.
If Python isn't your thing we are also starting up OSHIPrb (Ruby) and
OSHIPjava (Java). Using the same concepts of full development platforms
SDK) so that implementers can start with a full OPEN SOURCE software
stack in order to quickly build applications. We are also improving
tooling using completely cross platform and open source tools.
Join the Launchpad development team(s) of your choice via the umbrella
project at http://launchpad.net/mlhim
Cheers,
Tim
Hi Pablo,
A very useful insight into the issues indeed. This is one topic that may end up being a quite long discussion, but I feel it is a topic that is worth laying out, not only today, but every couple of years or so, to see where we are.
I’ll provide my personal views here. openEHR is not a small specification. It is not a simple one either. Considering the problem it is trying to solve, I do not expect it to be. Therefore, the complexity of implementation is significant. The nature of the problem openEHR is trying to solve inevitably creates the blind men and the elephant situation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
In explaining what openEHR is, we are faced with the problem of communicating the whole picture. In my experience, partial views or decriptions of openEHR lead to confusion, even if every bit of information provided is correct. Technical people and clinicians alike have a hard time seeing the big picture, and who can blaim them? The picture is really, really big.
Be warned: the kind of statements I’ve just started to make are usually perceived so that one gets the message “this needs to change”. No. When I say openEHR is complex, openEHR is big, openEHR is not easy to implement, I don’t mean openEHR is more complex than it needs to be, or openEHR is bigger than it needs to be, or openEHR is harder than it should be to implement.
We are attempting to solve a huge problem, and complexity of the solution will enevitably rise in response. The instinct to simplify the solution usually cripples the solution by pruning its support for less frequently required features, but most of the time, this leads to an unsatisfactory outcome. Surprisingly, everyone seems to follow the instinct.
In my opinion, tooling and education are the two most important fronts we need to make progress. The mechanics of an MRI is very complex, and yet, due to way it was implemented, it is a practical, useful clinical tool. The implementation of the very complex solution is designed so that without knowing anything about the underlying mechanics, it can be used.
Clinicians and developers need tooling to take control of complex concepts, and not having enough tooling is leading to lots and lots of angels and pinheads type of discussions. The chain of problems go like this: not enough tooling → not enough implementation → not enough understanding & feedback → lots and lots of hypothetical discussions.
So if (at least according to me) the biggest problem is tooling, why not build the tools and solve the problem? Because no one is paying for it. Whatever we have out there in terms of actual tools and implemenation is mostly out there thanks to good intentions and hard work of people. I’ve opened up the code I’m writing for my PhD, Ocean, Zilics, and people Rong Chen and Tim Cook are doing the same, but with limited resources it is hard to trigger a mass adoption.
We are moving forward, no doubt, but people staying up in the middle of the night are usually paying the steepest price, and the most interesting thing in all this is that the expectations are huge. Please do not get me wrong, I’m not saying this in response to your analysis, but most of the time, when people encounter openEHR, they are amazingly expecting a piece of software to install, which will deliver everything openEHR can deliver, out of the box. And of course they want it to be open source. When they can’t find this, they say it is not there yet. I think this is also related to education; personally I think that we need to stop people from having unrealistic expectations, and clearly explain what the offer is, and what it takes to turn that offer into value added.
Anyway, this is a big topic, and I can’t put everything I have in my mind into one e-mail. Still wanted to say these bits. BTW, I’ve written about openEHR almost two years ago, trying to explain it to novice, though my own understanding at the time was not very clear. http://www.serefarikan.com/?p=97 may be of help, next time you’re trying to describe what it is, at least some of it.
Best Regards
Seref
2010/11/2 pablo pazos <pazospablo@hotmail.com>
Hi Seref,
An excellent definition of the problem space.
Thanks,
Tim
Hi Pablo,
I also think regional community is necessary for this project.
I launched openEHR.jp in 2007 in Japan. This is the first regional community of the openEHR project.
We have provided Japanese translation and promotion for multilevel clinical modeling technology.
We have implemented on Ruby as OSS and been trying national intractable disease surveillance
database by openEHR technology.
Your idea, to make a guideline is interesting. We will also try to do it.
Cheers,
Shinji KOBAYASHI
2010/11/2 pablo pazos <pazospablo@hotmail.com>
Iron law of oligarchy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
Hi Thomas,
My opinion is the grade of adoption of a standard depend in some aspects of
goverment agencies, in some of the industry and some of the academy.
DICOM is a good example of an open standard heavily supported by the
industry, that's the point of it success. Can't be OpenEHR a de-facto standard
for EHRs? Like DICOM is for imaging. I think yes, but the progress of OpenEHR
to solve real the problems and make it usable, is slow.
I think OpenEHR is strong on the academy area. It has poor industry
penetration (I mean enterprises developing tools and aplying a good part of
the OpenEHR specification in their systems, and that these systems where used
in some hospitals). I don't know what's the penetration of OpenEHR on
goverment agencies. There are some open tools but there is some stillness on
making improvements on them.
For example, here in Latin America, almost nobody knows about OpenEHR in the
industry area, and very very few knows about it in the academy area.
There are some ideas that may help de difusion and adoption of OpenEHR:
- I think that regional OpenEHR communities are needed to empower the
adoption and spreading of the standard. In 2009 I send a message to the
mailing lists, but I get no answer from the community (this mail is below).
Now we have 36 members from Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Spain, and
more. They work on goverment agencies, big enterprises (like IBM), developers
and physicians. I think the international OpenEHR community needs to support
these regional communities, providing guidelines, general objectives, and
following their work. Here in South America, only few people know about
OpenEHR, that's a shame. People in goverment are making decissions, without
knowing that are good and open standards out there.
- Formal training and education in OpenEHR is needed. It's very hard to the
newcomer to understand how to use OpenEHR, and people interested on the main
ideas of OpenEHR may be dissapointed when they try to use it in a real-world
software application. People in the industry must be trained, but how many
OpenEHR trainers are out there?
not enough yet
But there are two things that will improve the situation:
* with the arrival of better, more open tooling for templates and
operational templates, and downstream transformations, much of the need to
understand the mechanics of openEHR goes away; software developers can use the
generated products, which could be openEHR XSDs, or even HL7v2 message
definitions.
* in the future we would aim for more web-available self learning material
In Set-2010 I've done a hands-on OpenEHR tutorial in Argentina, and people
(medics and TIC people) where amazed about building their archetypes and
having a tool that generates the EHR (this is my degree project). This was
done in the context of the "Argentine Congress of informatics and Health
2010". Now, the organizers want to make more time to discuss OpenEHR and its
posibilities. This is just an example that great things can happen if someone
has interest.
Regional OpenEHR communities can build courses fucused on the regional
needs, may be made some money to support the open tool development (*).
this is the key; to get the money, authorities need to be convinced it is a)
going to do what they need and b) not going to isolate them. They are very
scared of the second, even though it is not rational (since most of the
standards in their comfort zone really don't work that well, and not at all
together).
- Building and supporting open tools. The current tools have no regular
updates. We need developers to build new tools and improve the current tools.
We can use the money of the training courses (*) to pay developers to do this
job. If this depends only on the free time we have, tools just can die before
they are implemented.
actually, the ADL workbench and Archetype Editor are constantly being updated.
However, I only just realised that the link for the latter is not visible. I
will look into this.
- In order to help any goverment adoption of OpenEHR, the decission makers
have some questions that today OpenEHR can't answer.
- What is the state of the standard?
- Is it stable?
- Wich parts are stable?
should be fairly clear from the release page,
http://www.openehr.org/releases/1.0.2/roadmap.html
- Is there any return of investment study done on efective use of OpenEHR?
that's a harder question
- Or just, how much time and money I have to spend to effectively use
OpenEHR in a real world application? (I have to train people to make things
happen, not in an investigation project, but in a production project)
- What real world products are using OpenEHR?
- How these products are using OpenEHR? (they adopt the RM? the AOM? the SM?)There is page on "who is using OpenEHR" in the portal, but it is outdated.
My proposal is to do regular polls on the community in order to know: who is
working on what, and how they're using OpenEHR.
more up to date information would be good, however the information there is
not more than about 18months out of date, and in some cases more recent.
However, there is much activity that has no entry at all in these pages - it
would be good to obtain information on that.
- Formal links with "formal" SDOs are needed. I think that OMG is in tune
with the way OpenEHR do things. They have the COAS standard, and OpenEHR RM is
mapped to COAS. This is a good starting point to have something in common.
in fact, there are ongoing talks with IHTSDO about close cooperation and
development. Making someting happen in the 'official' standards space is the
key. Currently, many governments have been too scared to go away from the
official standards, even though they have had little success with them
I think there are very good posibilities in the OpenEHR adoption on the
industry adn goverment areas, but we need to build improve the lines of action
of the community to reach that.
agree.
- thomas
Hi Igancio,
Very true.
But! There are different approaches to leadership. Some proven to be
more effective than others.
Cheers,
Tim
Hi Seref and Shinji,
I share your opinions. Once in a while, we need discussions like this, since we have to lead ourselves somewhere and combine efforts if we want to support the difussion and adopton of the standard.
The domain is complex, the problem is complex, the solution must be complex, but if we add the complexity of the standard to the complexity of understanding another language (the specs are english only), we have a serious problems for a worldwide adoption. I share Shinji’s vision, we must support and encourage regional OpenEHR communities, specs translation, and “open source multilingual up-to-date tools” (most tools available are: or not multiligual or the translations are horrible, or not open source, or not updated recently).
I think regional communities can create courses, resources, materials, etc… and share them with other communities, throught OpenEHR foundation. Guidelines to do this must be set from the OpenEHR Foundation Boards (I think they are there to lead the community, to encourage the spread and adoption of the standard, I can’t remember the last time I saw an email of the OpenEHR Boards in the mailling lists). Within those guidelines, we can be coordinated, and maybe set year-based goals. And once a year or two we can make some event to share our experiences and progress from our local communities (can be local or regional events, since for most of ours it’s hard to travel so far).
These ideas are not new, just look at the HL7 coutry based structure.
I know this words may sound hard to someone, I just want to support the success of the standard, but I think if we keep doing things the same way, we’ll end with a high quality standard with no one to implement it.
Kind regards,
Hi Seref and Shinji,
I share your opinions. Once in a while, we need discussions like this, since we have to lead ourselves somewhere and combine efforts if we want to support the difussion and adopton of the standard.
The domain is complex, the problem is complex, the solution must be complex, but if we add the complexity of the standard to the complexity of understanding another language (the specs are english only), we have a serious problems for a worldwide adoption. I share Shinji’s vision, we must support and encourage regional OpenEHR communities, specs translation, and “open source multilingual up-to-date tools” (most tools available are: or not multiligual or the translations are horrible, or not open source, or not updated recently).
I think regional communities can create courses, resources, materials, etc… and share them with other communities, throught OpenEHR foundation. Guidelines to do this must be set from the OpenEHR Foundation Boards (I think they are there to lead the community, to encourage the spread and adoption of the standard, I can’t remember the last time I saw an email of the OpenEHR Boards in the mailling lists). Within those guidelines, we can be coordinated, and maybe set year-based goals. And once a year or two we can make some event to share our experiences and progress from our local communities (can be local or regional events, since for most of ours it’s hard to travel so far).
These ideas are not new, just look at the HL7 coutry based structure.
I know this words may sound hard to someone, I just want to support the success of the standard, but I think if we keep doing things the same way, we’ll end with a high quality standard with no one to implement it.
Kind regards,
ATT00001 (184 Bytes)