I was just thinking about records. All this data that we have on hard disks, cd, dvd and tapes will be good to have as time goes by, but what will happen if the flow of electrons is stopped? If we were all electronoic and there were no paper or stone tables to record our procedures etc. How will people of the future extract all this data?
At least the Egyptians left something for the following generations to read...but what if the technology gets lost and all the manuals are trapped on hard drives????
R Terry Ellis
DescriptMED, LLC
Get Done, Go Home!
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A number of organizations, including state keepers of the records (also known as "Secretary of State") are struggling with a related issue: what happens if you have archives that rely on a discontinued protocol to read? If an archived permanent record requires certain applications, operating systems and various levels of patching to be read, our decendents are in trouble. Think how expensive to keep "archival" systems going so you can look at that old document. What if getting a copy of your birth certificate was $100 because of the obsolete software needed to "print it"
Do you suppose anyone is planning an "open" format for Electronic Health/medical Records? One that is not proprietary?
--James
James Hatheway: Do you suppose anyone is planning an "open" format for Electronic Health/medical Records? One that is not proprietary? --James
not if CCHIT can help it !
Yes, OpenEHR foundation has that goal. http://www.openehr.org/about/foundation.html
Version 0.81 of PatientOS will demonstrate support for building clinical documentation using the shared Archetypes (shared content defined by clinicians) and granulinking. With this release there will be some real content and an extensive demo how to build discrete patient care documentation with inking.
Greg
http://www.patientos.org
Open Source is the future
caultonpos: James Hatheway: Do you suppose anyone is planning an "open" format for Electronic Health/medical Records? One that is not proprietary? --James Yes, OpenEHR foundation has that goal. http://www.openehr.org/about/foundation.html Version 0.81 of PatientOS will demonstrate support for building clinical documentation using the shared Archetypes (shared content defined by clinicians) and granulinking. With this release there will be some real content and an extensive demo how to build discrete patient care documentation with inking. Greg http://www.patientos.org Open Source is the future
Reading a database and extracting data isn't the real issue in the future. The issue I originally pointed out is what will it be like if technology fails and boxes(computers) won't run. An open source non-proprietary system will be in the same boat.
Well I don't think that would happen overnight. If stone tablets hadn't have lasted so well I am sure if the Egyptians could have upgraded their tablets annually for two thousand years and charged the Greeks and Romans to do so they would have done that and become the darling of wall street.
It is... unlikely... that electrons will stop flowing. It is both possible and likely that future information systems will look substancially different than the ones that we use today. It may indeed be a system that does not require electrons at all (perhaps photons? who knows.)
The real question is how do we make electronic records of today available in 1000 years given likely technology and legal shifts? To do this we need three things.
1. Reliable long-term digital information storage. So that we can store something and be reasonably sure it will be the same in 500 years (that is an engineering problem that I will not discuss).
2. Standards compliant data formats (CCR and CCD), so that we can translate information into future software
3. FOSS software, so that software stops dying with companies. It does not matter if you "have access" to the data, if reverse engineering the software that made it costs more than the value of the data. To understand data cheaply, you need to be able to read the sourcecode that created it.
-FT