Monday 24 May 2010

dementia

Did you know that dementia is one of the three main causes of disability in later life, ahead of cancer, cardiovascular disease and stroke. One in three people over 65 will die with dementia.
http://alzheimers.org.uk/tv

Thursday 6 May 2010

what micro-credit has to teach Healthcare IT standards developers

The account by Muhammad Yunus of how he started the Grameen Bank has many lessons for those of us trying to improve health through the development and promotion of interoperability standards. 
Yunus saw a local problem - the need for small amounts of credit to get small businesses off the ground.  He devised a local solution that was repeatable, adaptable and scalable. 
Scalability is important because the local problem/opportunity that he saw is repeated everywhere, and the rapid growth of Grameen and similar micro-credit schemes has shown that the solution he developed could be replicated.
To better support the scalable use of IT in healthcare we need an information sharing framework that allows local projects and trust relationships to be quickly and easily established, with the information requirements easy to define and implement, yet consistent with broader national information needs, and using commodity information management tools as much as possible. 
The requirement to be able to develop implementation guides that work for local projects quickly and cheaply is vital to the successful uptake of interoperability standards - taking this as a core requirement will change the sort of standards that we develop, and help us to deliver something truely useful.

Tuesday 4 May 2010

Specification Development Organisations need Strategic Methodology

Looking through the ITIL Service Strategy document it is clear that SDOs such as HL7 would greatly benefit from using the ITIL methodology to define and maintain a set of services that they deliver to their membership and other customers and stakeholders.  As a membership organisation that creates standards, HL7 has been delivering valuable services for years - but these have never been well defined, and their value has therefore not been demonstrated or managed.
Taking on such a methodology would also open up the interoperability space to those who work on delivering other services to support healthcare - who happen to be major stakeholders who will benefit from effective healthcare interoperability standards.
This is a critical part of broader stakeholder engagement by the Standards Development Community