Blog

As ever when I attempt to write a blog here I have stumbled across several topics I want to delve into further and I will to my best not to ramble on at…

Last Thursday, I joined Shrewsbury’s leading (and only) Science and Philosophy group, the Hmmm Squad. I’ve been meaning to go to one of these events for about…

Last week we flew to Gothenburg, Sweden for Medical Informatics Europe’s 2018 conference, hosted by the Swedish Society for Medical Informatics (SFMI) in…

We are preparing for the HL7 DataThon at the Medical Informatics Europe conference in Gothenburg, Sweden from the 23rd-26th April. At the DataThon, attendees…

Trying to find an appropriate tool for editing pathways has not been easy. Even the search terms have been hard to work out. You’ll be presented will…

Anonymisation techniques – either encrypting or removing personally identifiable information - enable the wider use of personal data. However, using…

Cross-sectoral action for health is crucial. The transport networks of our cities, the amount of green space in our neighbourhoods and the quality of our…

A healthy environment contributes to a healthy population. For example, when planning housing or other developments, considering how the environment can be…

Last week we attended the Birmingham in Real Time (BiRT) Network Resilience Challenges Workshop at the iCentrum on Innovation Birmingham Campus. The workshop…

Health inequalities are largely driven by socio-economic factors, and thus determined outside of healthcare. As illustrated by Dahlgreen and Whitehead's…

Far too many projects have no follow-up at all. The job is done and everyone moves on. "Benefits Realisation" is an improvement - but there is a risk that in…

The NHS has rightly said that having a standard terminology will make a real difference to the ability to analyse electronic health records and really get…

Healthcare can be seen as a complex adaptive system, as can the information that underpins, permeates and radiates from it. According to the TED talk below…

Managing scope is a key part of delivering a successful project - and this is particularly true when using information standards in healthcare projects. The…

Excellent comment by Mary Hawkins on the EHI article. There is a lack of evidence for most specific implementations of telehealth. This could be because, as…

The Olympics venues in London have been built with reuse in mind, building on the ideas of the Archigram architects, the structures are modular, can be…

Open access to interface specifications and example data for all healthcare IT systems funded by the NHS would enable innovation and quality improvement in…

Formal healthcare information standards organisations are always working to engage effectively with the communities that they serve, and also to discover…

The recent post by Keith Boone suggesting that healthcare information topics should be taught in schools is part of a wider recognition that healthcare IT is…

"Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" is a mantra that works for the environment, but how does it play out in the healthcare IT ecosystem? Reduce: Stopping the routine…

A response to the BBC article 'NHS and social services tested to limit by cuts - MPs' (http://bbc.in/gMawYC) If the NHS is to save 4% a year for four years…

I have been getting increasingly uncomfortable with the assumption in interoperability standards work that we are working to acheive semantic…

A recent report by The Network for the Post Bureaucratic Age calls on the government to use commodity products and services wherever possible. This will help…

The account by Muhammad Yunus of how he started the Grameen Bank has many lessons for those of us trying to improve health through the development and…

Looking through the ITIL Service Strategy document it is clear that SDOs, such as HL7, would greatly benefit from using the ITIL methodology to define and…

An interesting article from the Microsoft site posted in Jan 2010 on the use of DSLs in C# -- a resource worth looking at when thinking about how this…

The UK DoH strategy on Global Health is interesting in the priorities that it does identify, and those that are not mentioned. There is no direct reference to…

When thinking about what HL7 does, what it is paid for, who gets the value, and who provides the resources, I have come up with the following headings for the…

It is clear that writing standards is not enough - they need to be used, and to be easy to use. That means they have to be easy to find, and easy to digest. A…

As a phrase, this "Semantic Interoperability" is charmingly incomprehensible and empty. The best definition of "Semantic" that I have found is "All that there…

Having seen that HL7 specifications look and act very like Domain Specific Languages, it seemed sensible to look at the book "Language Implementation…

One of the lessons that I took from the quick discharge letter specification activity was that no specification stands alone -- there is always a need to…

More introductory musings - this time on the relationship between Interoperability Architectures and Architecture in the physical world. In particular looking…

Working on a simple narrative CDA discharge specification based on the Kettering message. The intent is to get something that can be implemented quickly, and…

I have been mulling for some time on how healthcare standards including HL7 can better engage with and leverage horizontal standards and technology…