My previous post got a few reactions from the IT people, all of them sounding as virgins having their panties pulled down. To say they didn’t like it is the understatement of the day. Which leads me to conclude I wasn’t clear enough. It also points to something being seriously wrong with their idea of [...]

If you’ve followed along, you’ll have seen what I regard as the major problems and what I think are the major solutions for the electronic health-care record in general. But if we want to get anything done, there are major hurdles that are different from one country to the other, mainly due to political system [...]

Now we’ve arrived at the last of the solutions in my list, namely “Opening the market for smaller entrepreneurs”. There are a number of reasons we have to do this, and I’ve touched on most of them before in other contexts. The advantages of having a large all-in-one vendor to deliver a single system doing [...]

Around 1996 I was part of the CEN TC251 crowd for a while, not as a member but as an observer. CEN is the European standards organization, and TC251 is “Technical Committee 251″, which is the committee that does all the medical IT standardization. The reason I was involved is that I was then working [...]

The quality of our IT systems for health-care is pretty darn poor, and I think most people agree on that. There have been calls for oversight and certification of applications to lessen the risk of failures and errors. In Europe there is a drive to have health-care IT solutions go through a CE process, which [...]

Forcing a large application into small independent parts that have to communicate with each other using minimal interfaces is always a good thing. Large monolithic applications go “fat and lazy” when there is no requirement to keep them split up. Also, the effort to expand and maintain the applications go through the roof. We know [...]

Ah, finally we arrive at solutions. The first in the series is the elephant in the room: issues. Why do I say “elephant in the room”? Because when a doctor examines and treats a patient, he thinks in “issues”, and the result of that thinking manifests itself in planning, tests, therapies, and follow-up. When he [...]