"Converge or collide?" A call to embrace 3 complementary standards - editorial in JMIR

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Converge or collide? Making sense of a plethora of open data standards in healthcare: an editorial

  • Guy Tsafnat; Rachel Dunscombe; Davera Gabriel; Grahame Grieve; Christian Reich

https://www.jmir.org/2024/1/e55779

This editorial is an absolutely brilliant counter-point to Enrico’s article - thanks for sharing it, Derek!

The authors have a significant skin and perspective in this area, and are well worth listening to. The key points I’ve taken from it:

Key Point 1: 3 domains with 3 solutions

There are three main domains in digital health that we need standards for, and there is an exemplar ‘standard’ for each. They also happen to play nicely with one another:

  1. Data exchange

    • addressed by FHIR (we all enthusiastically agree on that here in NZ)

  2. Clinical care & administration

    • the domain of openEHR (we kind of abandoned this here in NZ a decade ago)

  3. Longitudinal analysis

    • suited to OMOP (are we using this in NZ at all?)

Key Point 2: online community is key

They are all three backed by active volunteer online communities (like this one), which has led them to iteratively improve over a significant timeframe.

As an online community enthusiast, this is of particular interest to me - and deeply inspiring!

Here is the article in full for ease of reading:

Full Article as a PDF

jmir-2024-1-e55779.pdf (109.6 KB)

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Is an interesting question. I kinda feel like the three have pretty decent venn overlaps so guess it would be useful.

What I struggle with more is implementation details, with example patterns and test data (mainly from a FHIR perspective which is what I am most familiar with). I think that is something we should try and do more of but find the tools not that great.

Jon

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There is a well-established Analytics on FHIR Group that’s mapping FHIR Resources to OMOP. The intersection between openEHR and FHIR is less clear. Some see the openEHR archetypes and templates as logical models that can be converted to FHIR Profiles whereas others view FHIR as just a data exchange model. Full implementations of openEHR require it be used as a persistence model, whereas FHIR is neutral with regard to storage although it’s being used increasingly at that layer.