“From my personal knowledge of the last 10 years’ of standards activities in HL7 and CEN TC251 (including direct involvement over 5 years), it was clear that the mode of development was mostly ‘in-house’. Let’s look at HL7 first: it has produced v3 specifications (RIM, data types, message refinement methodology), CDA, vocabularies, an EHR ‘functional specification’, and more recently a services approach. Nearly all of this production has occurred within a committee environment, often by people with excellent domain knowledge, but also often with limited engineering skills. The same can also be said of the work done in CEN TC251, which has produced EN13606, HISA, EN13940 among many others. Likewise, in ISO TC 215, even though there is little de novo development, the process of choosing standards to fast-track into ISO also produces incoherence (but now with standards numbers attached) – this is also because of weak understanding of the technical consequences.”
Article
Woland’s Cat, 1 October 2009
