If your Healthcare IT standard was a River Boat...

Jun 15, 2011

I spotted this: If your programming language was a boat, and it got me thinking… what if your Healthcare IT standard was a River Boat? (A river boat is a hat tip to the old, but wrong, bridge metaphor for interoperability). HL7 v2

HL7 v2 is like a river raft with a rope guideline. Anyone can build one, they’re all slightly different, and they only go where the rope takes them.

openEHR

openEHR is a like a house boat - solid design from first principles, unsinkable, slowly coming along. All aboard to join the community party!

HL7 v3

What an amazing concept! Power like you wouldn’t believe. Once in flight, can carry an entire hospital across the river in milliseconds. Sadly, takes 100x the width of the river to get going.

(More info: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUTWWsh6iGA)

XML

Yep, you can do almost anything in XML. It just requires a great deal of hard work, with almost no help from your machinery

IHE

We’ll just bung a few different parts together - it’ll be fine; they’re all proper standards in their own right. There’s no risk that it will go bang later.

Snomed

This boat is made up of a whole lot of little bits that each float in their own right. Nothing is ever going to sink this boat. Where’s all the bits to make it work?