INTEROPen have launched a paper outlining the differing approaches and goals of FHIR and openEHR. We highly recommend reading the attached to understand the differing approaches and goals of each standard, and why they both have a valid and complementary place in the challenges faced in digitising health and social care. Please share with colleagues.
Authors: Dr Ian McNicoll of openEHR Foundation; Dr Amir Mehrkar of INTEROPen; Dr Tony Shannon of Ripple Foundation
We are pleased to update the openEHR community on the outcome of our EtherCIS international camp held over 3 days in London, December 2018.
A group of 12 individuals, representing 8 nationalities from academia, commercial and non-profit sectors came together to explore, discuss and plan the growth of EtherCIS and the open source openEHR community via an EtherCIS MkII plan. See here for the related roadmap that was agreed by the group as the way forward.
We are grateful for the help and support of Tom Beale (Ars Semantica & openEHR Foundation) who is now leading an EtherCIS MkII subgroup, working to coordinate this effort towards the public open release of EtherCIS MkII within the next few months.
More information on EtherCIS is available at http://ethercis.org/ , https://github.com/ethercis and https://gitter.im/Ripple-Foundation/EtherCIS
We welcome interest and involvement from any others who wish to get more involved in this important effort. If you are interested in becoming involved please contact us at info@ripple.foundation
Dr Tony Shannon
Hello and welcome to our Digital Commons Academy, a set of open access videos, which you are free to use and and share with colleagues.
At Ripple Foundation we appreciate that digital advancement in health and care is complex so we’ve broken down the issues into a series of short but thorough videos for you to explore. Our hope is that by watching the films on your own or as part of training within a team we can help to share our learning with you.
Each film is less than 5 minutes and covers a range of topics including clinical leadership, implementing change and the state of the current market place. We hope that they provide you with information and raise discussions for you to debate as a team, board or organisation. Full list of videos is available here or on vimeo.
We are a non-profit making organisation that was established a few years ago to support the adoption of an open platform for health and care. We believe that the future of digital health and care is not one single technology firm providing all the solutions but a vendor neutral market place where organisations large or small can compete fairly because they are developing solutions that meet a set of open standards in pursuit of an open platform.
We hope you enjoy the topics covered and please do get in touch with your feedback – we are always learning and developing at Ripple Foundation so we welcome your views.
EtherCIS Clinical Data Repository is developing at pace with radical new improvements in its latest V1.2 release including enhanced security, more complex querying, federation, improved configuration capabilities and much more. EtherCIS is the leading open source implementation of the openEHR standard in action (including AQL support) and these new developments make the use of EtherCIS even more compelling in the marketplace.
EtherCIS development is supported by the non profit Ripple Foundation and is a key component of their “showcase stack” and work towards an open platform in healthcare. It is led by Christian Chevalley of ADOC Software Development who said, “We’re thrilled with the latest release of EtherCIS and proud that our work combines contributions by the community across the globe. It is helping Health IT to become sustainable, open, vendor neutral and delivers patient centered clinical data handling with knowledge engineering. Helping to deliver this message to key decision makers and leaders has been part of Ripple Foundation’s mission and we are excited to be part of the action.”
Dr Tony Shannon, Director of Ripple Foundation said, “We welcome the work that Christian and his company is continuing to deliver for EtherCIS, it’s a great achievement and really helps to ensure that open platforms are the future of Health IT. We are also thankfully that cities like Leeds in Britain are implementing EtherCIS in their area for Helm, the adoption of an open platform Person Held Record. EtherCIS is helping to contribute to the global endeavour of improving data quality, access, storage and research which is fit for 21st Century care.”
Below is some further information on the enhancements made or if you require an indepth understanding please visit Github at https://github.com/ethercis/ethercis .
Enhanced Security
EtherCIS upgrade ensures sensitive data is further protected against eavesdropping and it controls access to the database, so users can only access the data they have been authorised to see.
Enhanced openEHR querying (AQL)
Users can now perform more complex querying due to new enhancements using openEHR templates for meta data. The openEHR standard has been adopted and implemented across healthcare systems throughout the world, representing the future of health IT.
Federation
Improved federation which allows information retrieval technology to simultaneously search in multiple resources. This means that a user can make a single query request which is then distributed to the search engines, databases or other query engines participating in the federation.
More configuration capabilities
EtherCIS REST server now supports a full set of parameters for basic HTTP, SSL, low resource monitoring and request logging.
Under the hood improvements
There has been an upgrade to a number of critical components including REST server, DB programmatic interface and XML handling. EtherCIS libraries have been cleaned up and simplified to reduce dependency conflicts and many unit tests have been finalised
To find out more about Ripple Foundation please visit www.ripple.foundation
ENDS
Defining an Open Platform – Thought-provoking collaborative document from the Apperta Foundation that we highly recommend reading.
The paper has pulled together with the experience and knowledge from a wide range of clinical, health informatics and health system economics including our very own Dr Tony Shannon but also….
We believe that the thinking within the report is relevant not just to the UK and Ireland but across the globe so please share this document with colleagues.
There is a widely held view that 21st century care is under pressure, in a state of near-crisis in many places (ref #NHSwinter) where the burden of disease and the limitations of current health and social care systems are becoming ever more apparent. We know that at the frontline, staff are already working under immense pressure, in unsustainable ways and that change is needed. We must find ways to “work smarter, not harder”. So we must also find ways to improve the quality, safety, timeliness and cost effectiveness of 21st century care.
Of course, the change that 21st century care needs will require strong leadership and changes in the way staff work at the coalface, and one question that presents itself is around the role of technology and specifically information technology.
Health and care commentators are, for the most part, all agreed that Information Technology is a key driver for change, while many are also aware that its great potential remains untapped. The gap between the hope and the reality of the promise of improving care via effective IT remains one of the key challenges facing us today.
In exploring this challenge, there is a view that the health and care IT market is not as good as it could be, lacking leadership and a mixed bag of technologies on offer with vendor lock-in a real issue.
Quite often it is still too hard to;
It would be hard to contest the fact that the current state of the health IT market is holding us all back from the advances that 21st Century health and social care demands.
Leeds is one of 25 integration pioneers chosen to lead the way on the integration of health and social care through; new ways of working for staff, process redesign and integrated digital care records. Many are at early stages for this work but all with the same focus to improve care and work smarter.
Leeds, as part of an effort to positively disrupt the market, has ploughed its own pioneering path in this field via a mix of open source and open standards to underpin the Leeds PPM+ platform which now powers the Leeds Care Record. Great progress continues to be made on both fronts and positive feedback from both users and citizens alike is emerging, but Leeds believes it would benefit by contributing to and working with a broader community.
Recognising this need for change, to collaborate and to support integration pioneers, Leeds City Council on behalf of the city and with the support of the integration pioneers submitted a successful bid for the second phase of NHS England’s Integrated Digital Care Technology Fund. With the clinical leadership of Dr Tony Shannon, we are now reaching out to work with those 24 other integration pioneers who want to be part of Ripple community which is focussed along 6 open strands:
We hope that in sharing our challenges, our learning and our efforts, we can kickstart a real health and social care community effort. We are keen to collaborate with all others who recognise this story and share this vision, who choose to take this path together.
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Repost from Tony Shannon’s Frectally speaking blog at frectal.com
My first blog of 2015 mentioned a word that is key to all change – culture.
Cultural change is a challenging thing and yet if we examine history, there is a noticeable pattern across all human culture over countless generations, from tribes to chiefdoms to city states to modern nations; the power of a story.
Often, scientific training teaches us that facts come first and therefore ones initial reaction may be to dismiss the power of stories. They can’t be scientific; there may be few specifics, no hard numbers or evidence base involved. I have many years of scientific training yet I realised as important as a scientific discipline is, any medical doctor will be able to recount a “good clinical case” – an individual patient story – that had a very important influence on their medical training and education. Certainly in the early part of my medical career I could not quite reconcile the power of these stories with the factual evidence base that we were trained to focus on and refer to. However as time progressed, I began to appreciate the real power in stories and what is also called “narrative” as an important element of the art and science of fields such as medicine or management. Clearly, there must be something about stories that we need to better understand.
So when I heard of a recent webinar by the Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management on “Stories of Us: …. using public narrative to …. inspire change” I was keen to tune in. The series of webinars run by a medical colleague Dr Claire Marie Thomas (who did a great job) brought an approach to my attention which immediately resonated. Exploring the “Story of Self, Story of Us, Story of Now” it was quickly clear that, as a means of leading change and particularly cultural change, such an approach to stories and narrative offers invaluable help..
The principle, as I understand it, is that all real change starts with one person, who leads and takes on that change. To do this they need to tell their own story, a Story of Self. For that person to work with others to achieve real change, that story of self needs to become a Story of Us, and for that change to begin to gain momentum the story needs to become a Story of Now.
So if you’re sitting comfortably, then I’ll begin … my own short story, my Story of Self.
My own background is from a deeply medical family in Ireland, my great-grandfather on my mother’s side was a doctor, both my grandfathers were doctors, both my parents were doctors, all of my uncles are doctors, my only brother is a doctor. Within that environment I did consider taking other paths, including a look at engineering in my last year in school, yet in the end I also wanted to become a doctor and graduated in 1993 from medical school, University College Dublin.
Once qualified, my first job was in emergency medicine and although I considered a variety of other options I quickly realised that in terms of clinical practice, emergency medicine was the most challenging, diverse, stimulating and rewarding of all clinical environments – nothing else came close to holding my interest and attention and so I chose it as my own medical field.
While doctors are understood as a privileged profession who work hard, most enjoy the push and the pressure that goes with the work, especially as it so readily offers a way to “give back”, in looking after your fellow man, your patients’, as a real means to make the world a better place. Certainly there are few places on the planet quite like an Emergency Department/Emergency Room, where “all of life is here”, literally from cradle to grave, where rich and poor are equal and care is provided based to whoever has the greatest need. The most moving moments in this intense setting.. are not those dramatic moments of the life or limb saved, but those moments after the event when patients and partners or family come together, quietly aware of what could have been, they are special moments to witness and stories not to be forgotten.
Over 20 years practising in Emergency Departments I can explain them as perfect examples of “complex adaptive systems” where you are constantly juggling patients from major resuscitation to minor injuries and everything in between, never sure what will come in next, always working to balance issues of the quality, safety and timeliness of a patients care.
Within that complexity and over time, I noted patterns emerge. Every emergency physician on the planet will know what I mean by the A/B/C approach to resuscitation, a simple yet vital tool to guide a team involved in the complex care of a patient by looking after: A – Airway, B – Breathing, C – Circulation. This process is essential to bring order from the edge of chaos. Another pattern I found involved asking a few key questions with every patient encounter: Was there anything I hadn’t covered? Had they any questions? Were they happy with their care plan?
One key pattern that leapt out from my early days as a doctor was the information intensive nature of work at the frontline. Every shift I have done has reinforced the point that to bring emergency medicine into the 21st century, we need much better information tools to allow staff to work smarter, not harder. My interest in this challenge meant that I slowly and steadily moved into medical leadership roles in Informatics and I have worked between emergency medicine and Informatics for most of the last 10 years.
So over the last ten years I have worked to lead and represent my clinical colleagues in the changes many of us believe are now required across healthcare in this 21st Century. I have listened to their stories whilst aware of my own and it has become increasingly clear to me that we are being hindered from making major progress in this field by the state of the health IT industry. Those who know me, who have heard my story before, will have heard me say that I believe the industry has much to offer and I know there are many good people working in health IT, but that the health IT market is way behind the rest of the software industry and holding us back. Simply put, we need better Health IT.
Today, in 2015… many patients journeys through our health systems are too cumbersome and time consuming. Today in 2015, clinical staff often find it difficult to work effectively with current health IT solutions, it remains hard for disparate clinical groups to deliver integrated patient centred care and it is too hard for clinicians to keep up with the latest evidence based practice without better information and better tools. In essence the Health IT market needs major change to deliver and develop those systems which are required to support 21st Century high quality, safe clinical care and self-care.
In recent years I have moved to lead on some of the change required by promoting the role of open source and open standards in work that has underpinned the development of the Leeds Teaching Hospitals PPM+ platform and the related Leeds Care Record. I think that this work has gone well and thankfully in recent times we have seen the market starting to change.
Yet there is much more work to do and it has become increasingly clear that my journey needs to take this mission further and wider, to support the development of an enabling “open platform” that I believe will transform 21st century healthcare via the Ripple Open Source Initiative. So it was with that mission in mind that I completed my last shifts in Leeds ED last weekend, a new journey is in store, a new chapter in the story of self.
Dr. Tony Shannon February 28th 2015
Link to the original post The Story of Self at frectal.com here