Hi!
I agree with many previous comments about how easy it is to underestimate the effort needed to implement an entire openEHR system. I certainly underestimated it (when doing a simple basic system for educational purposes) even though I already had considerable openEHR knowledge. (Thus the open source LiU-EEE openEHR system that I wanted to be somewhat complete by the upcoming BMC publication of the now accepted paper [1] will have parts/modules that are missing or only partly implemented.)
I think we need to find some good ways of modularizing openEHR implementations so that you (instead of implementing an entire openEHR stack) can implement/improve one piece at a time while using existing implementations for the remaining pieces. Having many ambitious developers starting implementations of entire openEHR stacks from persistence to GUI is likely a really inefficient use of our collective time as a community. Improving or replacing modules is likely more fruitful. Now there are a bunch of us that have already attempted more or less of the entire stack so we should be able to discuss a couple of modularization options in an interesting way.
There is certainly more than one way to slice the big openEHR-elephant into pieces and I think that we should try to agree on (and document) at least one or two ways as a start in the community. I and my co-authors have suggested one way of “slicing” or modularizing openEHR implementations using a REST-based approach, see [1] below. There is of course room for more ways to define components and service interfaces. People with an interest in SOAP-base approaches would likely be able to come up with a nice alternative approach. So I hope we as a community could work together towards for example one REST- and one SOAP-approach as a start. We can experiment openly with the current openEHR version and perhaps aim for formal specifications along with the upcoming 2.0 version of openEHR.
Best regards,
Erik Sundvall
erik.sundvall@liu.se http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/ Tel: +46-13-286733
References:
[1] Sundvall E, Nyström M, Karlsson D, Eneling M, Chen R, Örman H. Applying representational state transfer (REST) architecture to archetype-based electronic health record systems. Accepted to BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making. 2013;
Preprint manuscript available via email request from erik.sundvall@liu.se
Limited parts of the paper are also described in chapter 3.2 of my thesis http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-87702