There appears to be a mood of desperation in some areas of the eHealth brigade and even suggestions that we move forward with proprietary formats. This would be a huge mistake. The best example at the moment is attempts, in Australia, to push openEHR formats over the EN-13606 standards. EN 13606 is certainly based, at least to a large extent on the work of openEHR, however openEHR say “they have moved on” and have been busy “extending” and “enhancing” the standard.  openEHR is in fact an application architecture rather than a data exchange standard and most of the changes make archetypes created with the openEHR tools very specific to the openEHR environment.

This poses an unacceptable risk on others using those tools, as openEHR can evolve the specification in any direction they please with no recourse.  While standards development is a painful process it does generally provide for a balanced view of the world, or at least tries to achieve this. Vendors can develop against a standard and use it in innovative ways that the makers may have not even considered. A specification under the control on a small group provides no protection and should not be used for interoperability. 

We need to hold the line on the use of standards and avoid the temptation to take shortcuts, as in the long run those shortcuts will backfire and give control to a small group. The later openEHR ADL versions are not backward compatible and include many internal openEHR codes and information that is highly specific to the openEHR model. EN 13606 is agnostic to the final implementation technology and a stable specification and should be used for any public projects in Australia.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 12:16 pm and is filed under EHR, STANDARDS, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.