Thursday, October 24, 2013

On the Future of CDA

Another interesting post from Graham Grieve "On the Future of CDA". Graham argues that the current RIM-based strategy is over-complicated and that the CDA R3 team should focus on FHIR as vehicle in the future. See also these comments (emphasis added):

I have implemented CDA R2 from “the ground up” and I can honestly say that it is a real mess. The real problem is that it feels like it was designed by people who haven’t done much information designing in their careers; people who are experts in health care domains, but not in information design. Software people coming to the CDA for the first time are utterly baffled by its ornate, labyrinthine structures and quirky vocabulary.
I have also looked at all of the proposed replacements and none of them fix the inherent problems with the whole system. Any replacement needs to be completely modular, consistent, and without the arbitrary, almost random restrictions of the current model (why CAN’T you have a status element in the header for the whole report?). Modules need to be decoupled; none of these massive trees of schemas for each message. Vocab and schema structures need to be simplified and streamlined. All possible vocabulary should be included with the XML schemas for each module (or at least links to all the lookups), and the modules should be packaged separately (although a basic set can be package together as a “quick start”). I know, you’ll probably say FHIR is all this, but have you had non healthcare information designers look at it? You know, database designers. Business intelligence experts. Those folks. What did they say?

Great Post!!!
I am an “Implementer” and could not agree more with everything in Grahame’s post.
HL7 v3 (and by extension CCD/CDA) is overly complex, unintuitive and seems bent on maintaining an abstract data structure at the expense solving real world problems easily and quickly.
The incredible paucity of example CDA example documents from HL7 seems to indicate that even the standards developers have a hard time generating CDA documents.
Although I would hate to have to redo all the CCD/CDA development work we have already done, it seems like the best way to proceed if we can get something that is a better solution for the long term. I have very limited exposure to FHIR, but maybe this is what we have been waiting for.

Friday, October 04, 2013

Breath of Fresh Air for FIHR


From  Clinical Statements Task Force
On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Lloyd McKenzie wrote:

... While you *could* pursue a RIM-based repository for FHIR, it's hard to imagine why you'd want to and the presence of extensions would make it quite complicated.
Lloyd

On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 8:20 PM, Grahame Grieve wrote:

hi Lloyd

> it's hard to imagine why you'd want to

I find it quite easy - because you've already invested a lot of work in one.
And there are a number of people who already have. I invite all of you to help work on the RIM Mappings for the existing resources that are of interest to you - they've fallen behind, and fundamentally this is driven by a lack of implementer interest in them.
Grahame

On 4 October 2013 03:25:36 CEST Bob Dolin wrote:
To: Lloyd McKenzie , Grahame Grieve

Hi,
A bit late to the discussion.
Lloyd, are you asking why we should be mapping FHIR resources to the RIM?
Thanks,
Bob

On Thursday, October 03, 2013 6:23 PM Lloyd McKenzie wrote:
To: Grahame GrieveCc: Rik Smithies; Zel, M van der; Haarbrandt, Birger; RIMBAA; Clinical Statements Task Force

If you have one already, then yes it may make sense to use it.  However, if you're coming at the problem new ..., I'm not sure what using a RIM back end for FHIR would buy you.  Not saying it wouldn't buy you anything, just that I can't see it.
Lloyd McKenzie