Furnari, Chris wrote: > As a programmer I see a need to know > > 1) How should the data be stored/accessed > 2) How should the data be manipulated/updated well..... actually, if you have a component available, then all you need is the API for the component. Unless you are building the component itself. So, it depends on what you are trying to do. Most people agree that it is a good idea to build one or a small number of high-quality kernel components and reuse these ubiquitously. Then application programmers can get on with their applications, without reinventing GEHR (CEN/CorbaMed, etc) implementations all over the place. > If the data happens to be in SQL data table format (or similar) I as a > programmer would need to make a 'user interface' that would allow access to even better, you don't want to know anything about how it is stored, just how to access it (i.e. via an API) > the data and display it in a easy to read manner (item number 1). I would this is where the API comes in > also see a need to update demographic and insurance information as well as Both of these are likely to reside on their own servers. GEHR does not atttempt to define a full demographic model by any means - it just uses the minimum info needed to make sense of transactions, and leaves complex demographic models to local demographic databases (which tend to be all different). It records the local unique id of demographic entities in the record if needed. > add on records to the patient history (item number 2). We, as a group, > need to address what standards, system designs, methods of storing and > passing data are needed to accomplish all of this. For two examples, SQL > tables may be the way to store the information, while HL7 may be the way to you probably mean relational tables here. SQL is a way of querying, and is something you are quite likely to want to do. But that does not mean that you want to store things in relational table format. > pass data between cooperating systems. Maybe we should be looking at what > standards will implement a portion of the picture best. When we hav HL7 will certainly move data around, but HL7 2.x is problematic. Have a look at the HL7 v3 work to see what they are doing now - it is a model-based architecture, same as GEHR. Actually, there is a wealth of experience we can learn from in HL7, and we are certainly studying their work in order to improve our own. We intend to be HL7 interoperable in the medium term. Hope this helps. regards, - thomas beale
