Bert Verhees wrote: >> You refer to machine computer system interfaces and that these might >> be proprietary. Yes they could and will. >> But when the holy grail is about plug-and-play interoperability then >> these interfaces (archetypes) must be free to use. >> > > Gerard, how about SNOMED-tables, they are expensive, and many other > terminology-tables? > Will there be free replacement for that? > > One of the design aims for archetypes, from years ago, is that they had to work _with no external terminology_ if need be. They do this, and you can have an archetyped system that works perfectly well, even if you have no access to Snomed or ICD10. Mappings to such terminologies can be included in the archetypes, and if you don't have the terminologies locally available, you can keep working, even though you might well enter something that is not conformant to the terminology in a value field. However, in the future, I foresee archetypes being pre-processed into "operational archetypes" that include the value sets extracted from various terminologies in the archetype, so that if you don't have ICD10 say, the operational form of the archetype will include the relevant value sets (e.g. infectious respiritory diseases). > This question is also relevant for third world countries, or > health-information-systems used by poor organisations, f.e. free health care > systems for illegal immigrants in Europe and the USA. > > They may be able to read messages, because messages probably have beside the > code, also the description, but they cannot produce messages, because they > will not be able to code their content > the above approach would allow this, but I agree that the legality and licensing is not clear at this stage. However, I believe that if small extracted value sets (with no structure) cannot be used for free from Snomed, ICD, LOINC etc, then there is little long term future for the use of these terminologies outside rich countries (and even there, they won't work unless national level licensing is used, since otherwise you are up for some ridiculous micro-licensing model based on your use of 28 snomed terms in one of your archetypes).
Hopefully common sense will prevail here... - thomas > Thanks > Bert > > > -- ___________________________________________________________________________________ CTO Ocean Informatics (http://www.OceanInformatics.biz) Research Fellow, University College London (http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk) Chair Architectural Review Board, openEHR (http://www.openEHR.org)
