Blogs


- Woland's cat - Archetypical - Musings of a confused technology addict. - Blog - Atomica Informatics -


Archetype Query Language, The Confusing Bits, II | Musings of a confused technology addict.

29-06-2021

This is part 2 of a series of posts discussing the particulars and as the title says, confusing bits of AQL. Part 1 is here. I’m hoping to discuss what choices implementers of clinical data query language designers have and the implications of such choices. AND operator takes the stage So let’s talk a bit […]


Archetype Query Language, The Confusing Bits | Musings of a confused technology addict.

19-06-2021

AQL is one of the most clever things openEHR offers: a query language that allows users to access data they’re interested in, using the elements of openEHR reference model. Its primary author is Chunlan Ma, a real veteran of health IT, who has been a cornerstone of Ocean Informatics (Ocean Health Systems) for many years […]


The Health IT Platform – a definition | Woland's cat

14-05-2021

Following on from various posts in the past, including my 2014 post What is an open platform?, I thought it might be time to post a succinct (as possible) definition of the platform idea, for e-health. As stated in that …


What is interoperability? | Woland's cat

17-04-2021

There are some rather obscure definitions of health IT’s favourite term interoperability floating around, for example: Wikipedia: Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system, whose interfaces are completely understood, to work with other products or systems, at present …


Directions in clinical guideline programming – CHA2DS2-VASc | Woland's cat

29-03-2021

The above shows a typical web form calculator for the CHA2DS2-VASc score, used for estimating the risk of stroke in patients with non-rheumatic atrial fibrillation (AF), primarily for the purpose of deciding the use of anti-coagulant therapy [Wikipedia]. How would such …


Design-by-Contract (DbC) v Test-Driven Design (TDD) | Woland's cat

04-03-2021

Another bit of software engineering knowledge from my archive relates to two well-known formal quality methods used in software development. This is from a presentation made at ETH Zurich in 2010. The background to this is my use of the …


Software – from Development to Use and Ownership | Woland's cat

03-03-2021

Here’s an infographic (alright, it’s just a diagram) I created over a decade ago, randomly extracted from the archives. I think it’s almost self-explanatory. Here’s a few more slides using this. I wouldn’t adjust too much today, but note that …


Nominalism versus Ontology | Woland's cat

03-03-2021

Most nominalist arguments are straightforwardly wrong, but not for the usual reasons that universals and/or abstracta are said by realists to exist, but for the opposite reason: types and abstracta are 'just there', even if they don't 'exist', in the sense of being spatio-temporally concretised. The real problem is that we misuse the word 'exists' at least half the time in philosophy.


Aide Memoire for Computable Domain Models | Woland's cat

16-02-2021

Sometimes a graphic is worth more than words. This is an attempt to capture all the salient features of multi-level modelling, the openEHR way. See the openEHR primer for the story. Comments welcome.


Clinical Decision Logic Fun | Woland's cat

22-10-2020

How close can we get to making a clinical decision logic language look like the published guidelines which it is used to encode? Below is an openEHR Decision Logic Module (DLM) example, in the current form of the openEHR Decision …