My colleagues Alberto Moreno, Wellington Dimas, Marcelo R Santos, José Alberto Maldonado, Montserrat Robles, Dipak Kalra and myself have just published a paper titled “Clinical information modeling processes for semantic interoperability of electronic health records: systematic review and inductive analysis” in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
We have reviewed existing clinical information modeling methodologies and analyzed them to find out their similarities and differences. We hope this work can be of interest for you.
It seems to me that the pivotal point of the conclusion is “all of these methodologies share the idea of separating the definition of the CIMs from the actual representation and persistence of the data values”.
As for the persistence, I am not certain that I properly understand the point. According to the 2 levels paradigm, the persistence system, as all other components, are generic regarding archetypes/templates implementation, but still specific to the global information model (typically archetypes syntax).
It leads me to another (truly ontological) question.
As human beings, we have put the representation of data first when it comes to communicating : we just needs common words (vocabulary), in a specific order (grammar).
Obviously, we don’t need any “Global Information Model”.
Do you think that the need for a CIM comes ab initio from the lack of a common ontology or from something else (technical, education related…)?
Don’t you think that, at a time when health is recognized as far more than just medicine, a CIM (with a C for Clinical) is not a synonym for silo?
Such questions may seem quite provocative, but they are clearly not. The world of information management is evolving really fast (outside ) and I feel that it is not useless to question the very root of usual thinking - possibly to strengthen them.
) and I feel that it is not useless to question the very root of usual thinking - possibly to strengthen them.