I thought this was as good article on FHIR and OpenEHR…
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As an openEHR (and FHIR) enthusiast, I thought I’d drop in the summary and the full blog post here for ease of access. I like how it clearly outlines the differing nature and natural use-cases of openEHR and FHIR. It comes from a vendor (Better) who have embraced openEHR, so is naturally biased in that direction.
I particularly like this image, which makes me think of what Hira is attempting. Hopefully we can pull it off!
The Summary
FHIR+openEHRonepager.pdf (243.9 KB)
The Blog post by Alastair Allen
https://medium.com/@alastairallen/fhir-openehr-2022-53716f837340
Interesting article and I await, with baited breath, the promised solution to the key concern of mapping between the two formats. FHIR is agnostic about persistence, but openEHR is dependent upon it and the archetype query language (why not SQL?). Therefore, unless major EHR solutions begin to store archetypes, they’ll continue to exist mainly in boutique applications and Powerpoint architectures.
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HISO’s Interoperability Roadmap has this to say in its position statement on openEHR
- We will support a model-driven approach to software development by publishing technology-neutral data set specifications that can be fed into the FHIR resource design process. This approach allows other toolchains and methodologies such as openEHR to be used in software development.
- openEHR tools and detailed clinical models are welcome in the environment, but they will not be delivered by national programmes nor positioned as HISO standards. Previously, under our now-withdrawn reference architecture for interoperability, openEHR had a level of endorsement, but FHIR is now more prominent and this is where our efforts will go.
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For some fun (as Google was little help) I’ve asked the people at openEHR why this is the case:
Interesting replies from the openEHR Community, but implementers will make up their mind. I don’t have the time to engage directly with the openEHR people, but one of their basic tenants has been superseded by object-relational mapping capabilities in modern software development environments…
“When you query a relational database, your ‘schema’ (map) is the table structure itself, not the logical view of the data you would use when programming”.
In MS .NET this is now handled by the Entity Framework and in Java by Hibernate.
The very shortest notice, I apologise, but we have an invitation from Jamaica’s Ministry of Health and Wellness to hear about their openEHR experience at 10.00am Thursday this week (3 Nov). Please get in touch with me here or at alastair.kenworthy@health.govt.nz if you’d like to join this 60-minute session
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