Bill Walton wrote:
>Greetings, > >I'm an IT consultant / contractor in the U.S. and am currently engaged with >a group of seven of neurology practices in the evaluation of EMR/EHR >systems. We have reduced the field of vendors under consideration to three >and intend to make a selection from that set within the next couple of >months. We have recently begun evaluating the prospect that a viable open >source system will become available within a relatively short (i.e., < 24 >months) period of time. If this were the case, the acquisition could be put >on hold. A couple of questions... > >1) Is it your intention that openEHR eventually become a viable alternative >to commercial offerings, or is openEHR intended as an academic / research >tool? > well, I can say two things: a) the core people currently involved in developing the specifications intend to try to change clinical computing - everywhere. b) as more people become more active in openEHR, they will bring their interests to the table. Most of the ones I know of are interested in changing clinical outcomes in the real world. c) academia and research contexts are of course important, and are where a lot of innovation comes from. So we should not discount these. But the real aim is to change things (rather than just talking about it, to paraphrase Marx;-) >2) Does the openEHR Foundation exist yet or is it still under formation? > It does exist as a legal non-profit organisation, but as an international foundation, incorporated in the UK. The "openEHR" name and other special marks (e.g. "conforms to openEHR vX.X" etc) are also protected, ensuring that they are used for truly conformant systems and applications. >3) I may simply not have discovered it yet, but I expected to find a place >on your site where developers were engaged in conversation about the >components of the system they were developing. Could you share a little >about your operating model, particularly with respect to new developers >interested in contributing? > A number of developments are coming online. There is work being done in C#, Java, Eiffel and XML-schema that I know of. Some of this will become visible on the website in the next month or two. It is still early days, so how implementation work and collaboration pans out is not entirely forseeable. However, it is planned to get more people involved to give of their expertise on collaborative software development, developing test cases, conformance criteria and so on. The main effort to this point has been to get a set of specificatinos good enough to start work on. It is believed that the current ones are, and a baseline will appear soon. Mechanisms for submitting change requests etc will also appear soon, but of course, none of this work is instant! - thomas beale - If you have any questions about using this list, please send a message to d.lloyd at openehr.org
