My name is Nicola Onano.
I work for CRS4, a not-for-profit research center in Cagliari (Italy).
My group is interested in the openEHR project. Our aim is to build EHRs in collaboration with “Ospedale G. Brotzu” (a public hospital, here in Italy).
I studied the openEHR project, I found it very interesting and I appreciated the ease of use of the archetype editor developed by Ocean Informatics.
On the other hand, I can’t understand how to create a template from single archetypes, how to build the skeleton of an EHR, and I can’t find any documentations that explain it.
Do exist any example templates or example EHRs available for beginners?
In the web sites www.openehr.org and www.oceaninformatics.biz I read about a template designer developed by Ocean Informatics, but it doesn’t seem available.
Does it exist any freeware/Open Source template designer?
Note that we would probably not regard some aspects of these templates as representing ‘good archetyping/templating’ practice as they were developed quickly for screen data capture
representation rather than optimal data modeling purposes. Nevertheless they should give you some idea of how archetypes 'are used within templates.
Hi Nicola, nice to see interest is building up (in that lovely part of the World
Yes you are definitely right that not much information exists about templates and the only tool is unfortunately not freely available. However in order to start working with openEHR concepts and have a hands on experience I think current information, tools and artifacts are definitely more than enough. I did my Ph.D. thesis with archetypes and modeling clinical domains which started in 2003 and from that time I really did not need templates very badly. By no means I want to tell you that they are not important but just to make you notice that they are the last to consider when designing systems. From what I understand, pls. forgive me OO gurus, archetype design is finding out and modeling Classes - the difficult and essential part of a good design. Templates are like Packages or perhaps the presentation layer design using those classes. So without a solid archetype design and EHR structure templates will not make it better.
Well having said that, my personal opinion is both the importance and associated information and tools will improve in near future as the society has more real implementations and productive support from vendors. Because templates are just the last step for a real implementation (€€€) and we must all appreciate a substantial revenue is needed for all this great work go on.
Unfortunately at the moment, the only Template designer available is that
developed commercially by Ocean.
Perhaps what is even more unfortunate is that the template
_specification_ is not available so that others can make alternative
tools.
I understand that these things take time. Thomas Beale explained in an
earlier posting that they wanted to test the ideas before publishing a
specification and that they did get the wanted feedback from the NHS
prototyping activities. I guess what is lacking now is time, resources
and/or possibilities to prioritize specification authoring. Correct?
Any timing estimates when a draft might be available?
I wonder if it would be possible to adjust the release plan so that
template spec comes already in the next release. To make realistic
clinical demo systems something like templates is a crucial missing
piece. It's even more important than the security IM and EHR_EXTRACT
in many demo use-cases.
I believe the availability of more/free demo systems is of utmost
importance for the credibility of the openEHR right now.
The current Ocean template designer actually just uses a simple xml schema that was put together so that we could start to build templates in the absence of a specification at the time (2 years ago). Some of this has probably informed the template specification, however, Ocean expects to have to re-engineer the tool to utilise the specification that is released by openEHR.
Templates are just aggregations of archetypes, and so the actual ADL is not different at all, and the xml schema we are using is very simple. We would be happy to give anyone who wants it the schema, however as I said, this may require some changes when the openEHR spec is released.
For your interest, please find attached the xml schema that we are using in the Ocean template designer. Here is also a link to the NHS work where they are using the template designer for building clinical document templates. You can download these and have a look at the xml that was produced by the tool against the schema - http://www.ehr.chime.ucl.ac.uk/display/nhsmodels/Home
For your interest, please find attached the xml schema that we are using in the Ocean template designer. Here is also a link to the NHS work where they are using the template designer for building clinical document templates. You can download these and have a look at the xml that was produced by the tool against the schema - http://www.ehr.chime.ucl.ac.uk/display/nhsmodels/Home
and we must all appreciate a substantial revenue is needed for all this great work go on.