I’m at point 2 in the list of problems we need to solve. You can also find this text, possibly improved, on the iotaMed wiki. As new discoveries are made in medicine, we need to get these out to “the factory floor”, so they are applied in practice. If there’s a new more efficient diagnostic [...]

Let’s expand on the first item in the list I made in the previous post. I called this item “Lack of overview of the patient”, and that’s actually a pretty serious understatement of the problem. What we get in most electronic healthcare records systems is an evenly thick layer of prose stretching from a variable [...]

As the interest in iotaMed and the problems it is intended to solve clearly increases, we need to get our ducks in a row and make it simple to follow and to argue. Let’s do it the classic way: What is the problem? What is the solution? How do we get there? Let’s do these [...]

When designing new system architectures, you really must design for updating unless the system is totally trivial. This isn’t hard to do if you only do it systematically and from the ground up. You can tack it on afterwards, but it’s more work than it needs to be, but it’s still worth it. I’ll describe [...]

iotaMed is intended as an organizing overlay to existing information. It adds the guideline layer, including knowledge transfer and checklist functionality, to the classic electronic health care record. The information needed cannot be stored in the existing EHR systems, simply because they lack the necessary concepts. In other words, we do need our own database [...]

As is simply too painfully obvious, current EHR systems aren’t fit for purpose. There is a serious defect in the domain analysis, so that fundamental concepts such as “disease” and “clinical guideline” are simply missing from the EHR domain analysis. Let’s discuss the parts in this highly simplified diagram. The objects in green are unique [...]

Jeff Atwood wrote “The Programmer’s Bill of Rights” a couple of years back, and it’s entirely applicable to physicians using electronic health care records, so I paraphrased it here for our domain. Here goes. It’s unbelievable to me that a hospital or a healthcare organisation would pay a doctor more than $100,000 in salary, yet [...]

There’s a reason why our medical records systems don’t work and that reason goes back quite a way. As I’ve mentioned before, it goes back to when IT people started implementing the paper records in computers, assuming the paper records contained a complete model of the medical management of the patient, which they didn’t. Automating [...]

Every project and initiative in healthcare IT can be classified into one of two types: interconnection and the rest. Interconnection projects, as the term indicates, all have in common that they involve improving just the exchange of data and nothing else, by actually interconnecting two or more systems, or by creating some standard that is [...]

I’ve started to do mockups of the iotaPad interface, so I can illustrate the workflow of the iotaMed journal. I think those mockups are needed, since it’s very hard to illustrate how a medical record should work, unless you can see it in action.