On 25/10/2010 21:59, William Goossen wrote: > Interesting comment Thomas, > > I think " official standards " have nothing to do with obsession, but > with governments that have a legal obligation to ascertain some > equality on markets, regulations, and ensuring free access and > opportunities for all. Maybe I miss a few here, but I am convinced > that at least in democratic societies, it is what we as citizens want. > E.g. EHR laws do require official and public accessible standards from > official SDO's with formal balloting and procedures in place in which > all parties concerned can participate. > In particular the obsession might be on market dominance. > I am currently working on an ISO standard. One of the member countries > was commenting that choosing one particular approach in this standard > might favor that approach, hence blocking free trade.
I take your points, but there is a clear priority for quality, not just equality. In all other industries, the quality of standards is measured initially against public safety and then against criteria of effectiveness and economic qualities. No standard gets through (or if it does, survives long) if it a) endangers the public or b) doesn't do its purported job properly. In all other industries that i know of, standards are created by a process whose inputs are already developed and productised offerings from companies (or sometimes other entities, e.g. universities). The process is usually one of choosing or it may be one of a compromise agreement. Whatever the detail, the outcome is usually dependable, certainly in modern times. An 'obsession' with standards of this kind would be reasonable. However, this is not what are produced in health informatics. In our domain, the standards are created in committee rooms, and are issued, pretty much untested, with no real proof of public safety, utility, fitness for purpose, maturity or value for money. And yet the governments who run e-health programmes remain attached to these de jure standards, despite their obvious shortcomings. People working for such programmes have trouble engaging with organisations that produce implementation validated outputs, because use of such materials is not sanctioned. Until this underlying problem in e-health is resolved by a major reform in how standards are actually produced, validated, and maintained, I don't see much hope for efficient progress in this domain. - thomas* * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20101027/253de472/attachment.html>
