Thursday, June 25, 2009

Still no coherent way to track concerns?

I am grateful to Graham Grieve for posting the following comment to the entry ""HL7 RIM: still no coherent way to track concerns":

I think your quoting Dan's email in this way is highly inappropriate. You have also cherry picked the various responses to Dan. For instance, you didn't include mine. Your comment is: "Why was the change of adding CONC and COND not made to the official RIM standard" is highly disingenuous - trying to portray a technical mistake as a policy issue.

I think you may have a point about condition vs act, but the continued errors of reporting and perspective this blog entry shows make it really hard to bother listening to your point.

I am happy to provide a link to the requested larger set of responses here (no letter from Graham among them, however, for the reason given below). I am also happy to withraw my portrayal of what Graham certifies is a technical mistake as if it were a policy issue. My reason for jumping to conclusions in this way turned on the repeated reports which I receive from persons with a much better knowledge of HL7 than I, to the effect that, when proposals to simplify HL7 are put to ballot, there is a tendency for such proposals to be voted down.

Postscript July 7, 2009:
In a further comment, Graham now writes:

It's certainly true that repeated proposals to simply HL7 are voted down. There's several reasons for this which could be variously categorised as the good, the bad and the ugly. But by and large it appears to be an inevitable part of the standards process: you only ever add scope and requirements. And refactoring is always hard to pull off, let alone when other people get to vote on the outcome in a consensus based process ...

Somewhat embarrassingly, it turns out that my email to Dan was private, not cc:ed to the list (I think by accident). Whoops, so my apologies on this count Anyway, this one was a technical mistake, and it appears that it will be rectified as a technical error.

I look forward to seeing evidence of the rectification. And I hope that it is done right -- i.e. that 'condition' gets to mean 'condition' and not, for example, 'observation of condition', 'worry about condition' -- so that the existing problems with 'disease' are not simply recreated under a new heading. A condition is not an act.