HL7 and the Ringholm Effect
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 […]
Surfing the PCEHR Waves
Well, it’s just a little over 14 months till the launch of Australia’s Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR). And we have already seen two ‘waves’ of grant funded ‘implementations’ announced by Health Minister Nicola Roxon. The PCEHR draft ‘Concept of Operations‘ was released publicly on the 12th of April and organisations and individuals have until […]
Bags of problems
It seems that there are very few people involved in health information standards that are able to discern the difference between a thing in the singular and things in the plural! Perhaps many people can discern the difference but just don’t realize how difficult it is for computers to discern the difference. So often I […]
Bridging the Gaps
Implementing a national Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) system through grant funded proposals submitted by interested parties seems to me a strange way to implement national infrastructure of any kind. It might be a common mechanism for funding projects in the arts, and for scientific research, where we don’t know what we might end […]
Recasting e-health in the USA
On December the 8th, 2010 the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) published an extraordinary “Report to the President realizing the full potential of health information technology to improve healthcare for Americans: the path forward“. This report is extraordinary for a number of reasons. Firstly, PCAST is not comprised of government […]
Coded data ?
There has been a long held view, even mantra, amongst health informaticians that data should be “structured” and “coded” if it is to be harnessed for clinical decision support, adverse event prevention, and for research purposes. One trouble is, the concept of “coded” data means different things to different people. Australia was at the international […]