DECISION SUPPORT Archives

Extreme e-Health – what’s gone wrong?

Oct 23, 2011 | DECISION SUPPORT, EHR, HL7, MESSAGING, SOAP, STANDARDS

Extreme failure in e-Health programs is in the news and Australia, as it usually does, appears destined to repeat the mistakes of others. There is clearly a fundamental error in the approach to the problem and like the global financial crisis, I would postulate the...

Why CDA is a poor choice for prescribing

Oct 13, 2010 | DECISION SUPPORT, EHR, HL7, STANDARDS

There are some who feel that a move to CDA for electronic prescribing is a better option than using HL7 V2 messages. I would contend that this is seriously misguided. Prescribing is in effect an ordering activity and orders have line items and are not documents in any...

PDF Healthcare – A risk to meaningful use?

Sep 13, 2010 | DECISION SUPPORT, EHR, HL7, STANDARDS

We are often faced with organizations wanting to transmit PDF documents. This is superficially attractive as the presentation is usually good and it’s a single file. Is there a problem going down this path? I think it’s a huge dead end. Australia started eHealth with...

NEHTA – On the road to nowhere?

Mar 30, 2010 | DECISION SUPPORT, EHR, HL7, MESSAGING, STANDARDS

National Health IT programs do not have a good record of success in general, and Australia has been a good example of that to date. I don’t think anything is about to change. The reasons for this will no doubt be well understood in time, as history looks back and...

Why is Health IT so hard?

Dec 28, 2008 | DECISION SUPPORT, EHR, GELLO, STANDARDS

Every now and again someone decides that health IT is obviously doing something wrong and they are going to fix it. This is a familiar call, often made by well meaning bureaucracy and its part of the problem and not part of the solution. Health IT is hard and its...

GELLO and SNOMED

Dec 21, 2006 | DECISION SUPPORT, EHR, GELLO, SNOMED, STANDARDS

It’s and awesome combination. Thats the feeling we have after completing the first round of integration between our GELLO interpreter and our SNOMED-CT server. One simple Method “.implies” has some much power in a multiple inheritance hierarchy like SNOMED-CT. For...