Healthbase blog: musings on ehealth...

HL7 and the Ringholm Effect

HL7 messages are the lifeblood of electronic health communication in many settings in many countries. In the healthcare sector in Australia, for example, they are ubiquitous in hospital settings for notification of patient Admissions, Discharges and Transfers and they are … Continue reading

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PDF attachments in HL7 messages

Last year in Australia there was an agreement amongst a number of parties, led by the Australian Department of Health, for the results of diagnostic tests to be sent to the national electronic health record system for accessing by both … Continue reading

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The Power, the Glory and the Dangers of structured health data

It is now over eighteen months since I publicly aired my grave concerns regarding a  critical safety issue for Australia’s Personally Controlled Electronic Health Records (PCEHR) system, which centred around the lack of scrutiny of the quality of data in … Continue reading

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Inching towards standardised pathology messages

Fortunately, I’m now almost old enough to have forgotten the christmas pudding ritual – helping my father cut up the suet, spread out on sheets  of newspaper on the dining room table. In those days, I was then already tall … Continue reading

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Hiatus in Global HL7 CDA Challenge

Well it is now several months since I established the Global HL7 Challenge and the deadline for the first part of the challenge has just passed with no respondents. I can only put this down to a global lack of … Continue reading

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The squandering of wisdom

I started out titling this post “the getting of wisdom”, but slowly came around to acknowledge that there has been some real wisdom generated in health informatics over the years – it just seems to mysteriously dissipate like dry ice … Continue reading

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Global Hl7 CDA Challenge

In my previous posting on this blog, I cited hospital discharge summaries as a potential barometer of broader e-health capability. I’m sure there are significant organisational and “change management” factors that have impeded the deployment  of information sharing typified by … Continue reading

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