HL7 messages are the lifeblood of electronic health communication in many settings in many countries. In the healthcare sector in Australia, for example, they are ubiquitous in hospital settings for notification of patient Admissions, Discharges and Transfers and they are ubiquitous in both hospital and primary care settings for reporting pathology results to the ordering […]

Last year in Australia there was an agreement amongst a number of parties, led by the Australian Department of Health, for the results of diagnostic tests to be sent to the national electronic health record system for accessing by both care providers and the individuals for whom the tests were performed. The current proposal to […]

It is now over eighteen months since I publicly aired my grave concerns regarding a  critical safety issue for Australia’s Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records (PCEHR) system, which centred around the lack of scrutiny of the quality of data in CDA documents to be contributed to people’s records. I have no idea if anyone other […]

Fortunately, I’m now almost old enough to have forgotten the christmas pudding ritual – helping my father cut up the suet, spread out on sheets  of newspaper on the dining room table. In those days, I was then already tall enough to also be able to peer down into the saucepan my mother used to […]

Well it is now several months since I established the Global HL7 Challenge and the deadline for the first part of the challenge has just passed with no respondents. I can only put this down to a global lack of capability to implement HL7 CDA based solutions beyond the simple HTML style of document rendering. […]

I started out titling this post “the getting of wisdom”, but slowly came around to acknowledge that there has been some real wisdom generated in health informatics over the years – it just seems to mysteriously dissipate like dry ice on a sunny day, simply adding to the world’s increasing entropy. People ignore it. People […]

In my previous posting on this blog, I cited hospital discharge summaries as a potential barometer of broader e-health capability. I’m sure there are significant organisational and “change management” factors that have impeded the deployment  of information sharing typified by electronic discharge summaries. Many commentators dismiss technological obstacles as a minor distraction in some vast […]