On 27/10/2010 22:32, Grahame Grieve wrote: > Well, your specific comments certainly don't back your general > statement up. Looking at the question of the other industries, what > specific standard would you point to as an example we should follow, > and how was it developed?
- safety goggles and other personal safety equipment - nearly every part of a modern car that has safety implications for passengers - all telecoms signalling standards, including over radio, microwave tightbeam, and cable - any physical digital media, including DVD, Bluray, DAT, etc - nearly every thing to do with the motherboard and disk bus in a PC - VMEbus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMEbus) - standards for energy efficiency of building materials - standards for nearly all building components, including steel beams, concrete and so on - etc None of the standards used in these areas were developed in a committee room with a random assortment of people who turned up a few times a year. Instead, companies (e.g. Ericsson, Morotola, Toshiba, Philips, BMW, etc) created products and brought them to market, and then brought the relevant interoperability specifications to standards forums. E-health should follow the lead of e.g. the telecoms and computer components industries and standardise on things that actually have been shown to work. As I said earlier, it doesn't just have to be companies that make things that work. Linux, Apache and the IETF standards came from different places. But in all of these situations, the relevant standards were first validated by implementation, deployment before being proposed as a standard. What is happening in e-health is just bizarre. And the results show it. - thomas > > Grahame > > On 28/10/2010, at 8:25, Thomas Beale > <thomas.beale at oceaninformatics.com > <mailto:thomas.beale at oceaninformatics.com>> wrote: > >> On 27/10/2010 21:10, Grahame Grieve wrote: >>>> In all other industries, the quality of standards is >>>> measured initially against public safety and then >>>> against criteria of effectiveness and economic qualities. >>> it seems you mean, by market testing. If not, do you have an example? >> >> well yes and no. Products produced by big companies of course have to >> undergo all kinds of testing to do with safety. With respect to >> fitness for purpose, the market will certainly sort a lot out. But to >> get to market, you have to have completely implemented and >> productised the offering - which means going way past the paper >> stage. By the time standards agencies see these things, they are >> guaranteed to 'work', the only question is to do with what they >> interoperate with. >> >>>> In all other industries that i know of, standards are >>>> created by a process whose inputs are already developed >>>> and productised offerings from companies >>> I presume you refer to non-it industries. In IT the picture is rather >>> more mixed. You certainly aren't describing the omg process, or the >>> itu process, or the w3c process here. >> >> IT in recent decades has become quite poor, no doubt about it. Older >> standards (e.g. older network standards) tended to have hardware >> implications, and they simply could not be issued without having >> being implemented somewhere. In more recent times, W3C does at least >> manage some implementations of what it issues, but is mainly helped >> by major tech companies implementing the standards. Nevertheless, >> standards like XML Schema are still horrible, very weak formal >> underpinning, and hardly fit for purpose (being a document-based idea >> trying to satisfy data representation requirements). See >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Schema_Language_Comparison . >> >> OMG has better process than any SDO in e-health, but the output is >> not always that inspiring. UML 2 is awful (try reading the >> 'infrastructure' and 'superstructure' specs - you really have to >> wonder what drugs they were taking), as is XMI. Which is why the >> Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF) sprung up in the modelling space - >> to provide a usable alternative to XMI. >> >>> A truly valid comparison would be with IT standards in other vertical >>> markets. Insurance always strikes me as applicable. Do you have any >>> examples from these spaces? >> * >> * I know a bit about investment, and there is to be sure, less to >> standardise. The interesting comparisons I think are in construction, >> mobile telephony, automotive, telecomms, etc. Standards just don't >> get issued as paper with no products behind them in these industries. >> >> - thomas >> >> _______________________________________________ >> openEHR-technical mailing list >> openEHR-technical at openehr.org <mailto:openEHR-technical at openehr.org> >> http://lists.chime.ucl.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical > > > _______________________________________________ > openEHR-technical mailing list > openEHR-technical at openehr.org > http://lists.chime.ucl.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical -- Ocean Informatics *Thomas Beale Chief Technology Officer, Ocean Informatics <http://www.oceaninformatics.com/>* Chair Architectural Review Board, /open/EHR Foundation <http://www.openehr.org/> Honorary Research Fellow, University College London <http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/> Chartered IT Professional Fellow, BCS, British Computer Society <http://www.bcs.org.uk/> Health IT blog <http://www.wolandscat.net/> * * -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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