Complexity of Standards - Updated

Nov 14, 2013

Someone asked me to update the diagram, from The Complexity Of Standards:

A rough plot of the internal complexity of the standard (y, log) vs the complexity of content that the technique/standard describes

They wanted to know where FHIR sits on the graph. Well, here’s a guess:

 

Comments:

  • The goal is go downwards and right
  • While I think that FHIR is inherently simpler than HL7 v2, it’s breadth of functionality is a lot wider, so I couldn’t rate it as overall simpler
  • FHIR has more semantic depth than CDA in several directions, though the core clinical statement in CDA can go further - but both CDA and FHIR become exercise in extension at that level. So FHIR wins by a little

When I look at this graph, and the position of openEHR, I know I’m going to get comments, so a note about that: this ranking of openEHR is based on the whole openEHR stack. OpenEHR has a methodology (templating) which they use to take the full awesome breadth of the openEHR eco-system, and produce simple XML that’s easy to use. If I put that on the graph, it would be near the FHIR slot - probably a little less breadth, but a little more semantic depth, and round about the same complexity.  I guess.

Look, this is rough anyway, so don’t read too much into it. It’s really meant to be just pointing out that what we all want is down and right.

p.s. Snomed is still off the top for complexity, and not far enough to the right.