Dear all, It has been a long wait, but we completed Release 1.0.1 of the openEHR specifications over the weekend. Quoting from the home page:
openEHR RELEASE 1.0.1 published 15 April 2007 The result of 14 months' review, implementation and testing, this release is a major milestone, correcting and improving the openEHR Release 1.x platform. We believe Release 1.0.1 to be a stable base for ongoing implementation and forthcoming specifications, including the Template Model, EHR Extract, Security, Archetype Query Language, CEN EN13606 integration and services (in cooperation with the HL7/OMG HSSP project). It also provides a foundation for tools and systems for the development and governance of clinical models, including openEHR archetypes, templates and terminology subsets. Together this forms the "openEHR Health Computing Platform", as shown on the diagram on the openEHR home page. Please see the links on the home page for the release notes, specifications, online UML and XML-schemas corresponding to this release. As Chairman of the Architecture Review Board of the Foundation, I would like to acknowledge my fellow members and all the people who have contributed to the ongoing development and refinement of the specifications, including their implementation in formalisms such as XML-schema, and various programming languages - see the project team page - http://svn.openehr.org/specification/TAGS/Release-1.0.1/project_team.htm. The future will be exciting. Over the coming months, further pieces of the health computing platform will fall into place, including (as mentioned above): * the Template Object Model - a standardised object model of openEHR templates, along with a dADL and XML syntax specification; * the openEHR EHR Extract specification - a model of Extracts for use with openEHR and other systems; * a security model based on CEN EN13606 part 4; * a query language for archetyped data (provisionally called 'AQL'); * standardised service and programming interfaces for the EHR and related services, including the "virtual EHR", EHR service, demographic service, archetype service and others. An important part of the work ahead is the integration of openEHR with de jure standards, including CEN EN13606, the HL7/OMG Services work, HL7 CDA, and SNOMED-CT. A final note on the identifier of the latest release - "1.0.1". This release contains 51 Change Requests, and as software people will know, no-one creates a 'minor' release with so many CRs. However, semantically it fulfills its purpose: correction of errors and improved textual explanations. As intended in the two-level modelling methodology of openEHR, the changes to the core platform specifications will be kept to an absolute minimum over the coming years; further releases will mainly be about additions rather than changes. Implementers will have a direct say in all future change proposals. We hope this release and the growing openEHR Health Computing Platform will prove useful to those in the open source health software community. -- *Thomas Beale* /Chief Technology Officer/ Ocean Informatics <http://www.OceanInformatics.biz> Chair Architectural Review Board, /open/EHR Foundation <http://www.openEHR.org> Honorary Research Fellow, University College London <http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk>
