Hi @DrJo,
I’m not in a late night rant mode again (and will avoid that mode whenever possible). But your posts always trigger thoughts and reactions in me… so here’s a little amendment/commentary to your principles:
- Keep it simple.
a. without throwing away any valuable health data about patients or populations that were collected in a more complex way, and use sticky tape and glue to get access to the old stuff through the newer simpler stuff. - Define your terms.
a: Amen! - “Science it”. Build it around a good model of how science works: start with identifying your problems, and then iteratively create, test, and refute models.
a. Start with open source and open standards where the models are visible to everyone (including any normalisation when stored in RDBMS
) so that such a debate can be had. Otherwise you’re just accepting what Oracle or other IT behemoths foist on you, and in which the model is invisible, and only the UI can be seen, or the (often poor) serialisations of standards-based export formats.
I also thought you might like to know that Einstein’s oft quoted maxim:
Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler
was probably a paraphrase from the following quote in a 1933 lecture:
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
From “On the Method of Theoretical Physics,” the Herbert Spencer Lecture, Oxford, June 10, 1933.
simple, huh?
cheers,
K