On 04/07/2013 10:40 AM, Thomas Beale wrote: > Is there a better meta-architecture available?
I think is a very good architecture, that is why I am using it, but I(we) keep having to deal with people who think otherwise. I am not smart enough to point out why HL7v3 messaging is good or bad, or what William Goossen does now, DCM, is good or bad. As long as a system can hold all required information, I think it is good enough. But good enough does not mean that it cannot be improved. I have some thoughts, but that concerns the way they define the messages, and I think, it is a shortcoming of the system, that it only can be done that way. I think the messages themselves, as designed by NIctiz, for example, are very complete, and can hold all required information. But, there is some doubt in evidence based practice, so freedom is very important. And in that part, HL7v3 and DCM do not satisfy on this. They don't offer freedom, they impose elsewhere and predefined ways of thinking and methods of treatment. Did you see the link Karsten Hilbert published? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij8bPX8IINg Don't eat like a pig and get some exercise is often a good medicine for many diseases, but that does not make money. But not only, sometimes it is even better not to treat people at all. There is quite some discussion between physicians on what is a good way to treat people. And we also have alternative medicine, such as herbal medicine, acupuncture. This should, all fit in information systems. I am happy to be a technician and like to offer freedom to the users of my software. The advantages come, as I already explained, from my point of view with the flexibility, and the completeness of the eco-system, and the easiness with which, even non-technicians can get involved in system-modeling. I once explained it on Wikipedia with two drawings. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SingleLevelModelling.png http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TwoLevelModelling.png In the first, the technicians have to talk with domain-experts, and with the users. Technicians talking about evidence based practice? That does not make sense. In the second, the technicians are standing beside, and create a base platform on which users and domain-experts can design their system. More or less this is OpenEHR. But there is still work to do, for example a good GUI-creator, like Visual Studio (does that still exist?), and generate archetypes from a designed GUI, helping them to incorporate terminology etc. And of course, good non-GUI-building archetype-editors which are still not there, the complains I had about the both mainstream archetype-editors were admitted, but the improvement did not yet come. A really good user friendly development environment, which is absolute necessary to make the idea of multi-level modeling to work, has not yet arrived. Ten years we are working on that, and still we do not comfort the users, who we value very much as main system-modelers, with easy ways to do, what they are expected to do in our philosophy. Bert
