|
|
|
|
|
Updated: Feb 1, 97 |
GEHR | |
| Contact: Prof. David Ingram St. Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College Clinical Skills & Informatics Charterhouse Square London EC1M 6BQ, U.K. Tel.: +44-71-982.61.00 Fax: +44-71-982.61.03 |
GEHR will offer, in the public domain :
The development of such an architecture is of very general relevance to the field of health informatics. Inevitably, the topics addressed in the project workplan have been closely connected with the work of many other projects within the AIM programme and its Concerted Actions. They impinge further afield in developing individual, national and European initiatives. They relate closely to the efforts currently devoted towards co-operative development of standards for Medical Informatics, embodied in Europe within CEN.
The project team has a strong representation of clinical practitioners as well as wide technical expertise and experience in the field over thirty years. Three task groups, covering clinical, systems, and architecture perspectives, co-ordinate the allocation of work activities and the drawing together of results. Ethical and legal requirements have been addressed with national bodies and experts in several countries. The requirement that the record should support and promote clinical excellence is important and the requirements for medical education are a component of these. Clinical users from different disciplines in several countries have been involved at all stages of the work. An internal quality assurance programme has been an integral part of the project.
An evolving set of prototypes, starting from an established architecture (CHRA) and commercial product (HDMP, Health One} has been a key feature of the project. These prototypes have enabled all issues confronted within the project to be the subject, where desirable, of empirical testing by potential end users at a set of implementation test sites within Europe. Many other AIM projects have expressed interest in making use of these prototypes in their own work programmes and a wide ranging set of collaborative links is already emerging from the GEHR project, within and beyond the AIM programme.
In the final year the major effort has been applied to the formal architecture description. This has been a very complex task involving successive modelling exercises, with refinements and modifications being studied and tested by informatics and clinical experts within and beyond the project. This architecture definition has been published in GEHR Deliverable 19. This starts from a description of the record in clinical terms as derived from the requirements deliverables. From this emerges a set of concepts with which a generic model of the content and structure of the record, in all its diverse instances, meeting ethical and legal requirements, is defined. An EBNF notation is used for this first level of formal description. A set of terms in all community languages is proposed in support of this model architecture. The model is then used to define an exchange format, one particular view of any possible GEHR compliant system data structure, for interoperation among systems. For this an ASN1 definition is used. Finally, an object view is taken of the architecture using a set of object classes to embody the GEHR concepts. For this Rumbaugh diagrams and EIFFEL implementation prototypes have been used.
It has been important to make the architecture open to progressive refinement and to the incorporation of new requirements and advances, such as in the systematisation of medical knowledge and in the utilisation of new technologies.
The project has also built and provides specifications for tools to interface between the object model and the emerging range of standard messages. For example, laboratory data, (OPENLABS), images (DICOM), ECG (SCPECG), and such generic messages as HL7 and message protocols such as EDI.
The final phase of the project has seen the incorporation of the formal architecture into the next generation of prototypes, which will also conform to the ethical and legal guidelines proposed in that deliverable. Some progress has been made in the production of clinical systems incorporating these prototype integration tools, some of which will be demonstrated in December, in Lisbon. Evaluation across clinical specialities and professional disciplines is proposed in test sites which will also incorporate a wide range of data types.
The GEHR consortium has agreed that the architecture will be made accessible in the public domain at the end of the project. The consortium will propose a limited project or accompanying measure with others in Framework 4 to enable the architecture to be developed and made accessible and effective for all those who wish to use it. This will cover awareness programmes, documentation, training, and the establishment of mechanisms for professional updating and testing of compliance of systems within clinical and commercial communities across Europe .
| Dr. Christian Aligne Croix Rouge Francaise 1 Place Henri Dunant F-75008 Paris, France Tel.: +33-1-77.22.02.20 Fax: +33-1-77.29.68.07 | Dr. Daniel Mart Association des Medecins et Medecins Dentistes du Luxembourg 3 rue Marie-Adelaide L-2670 Luxembourg Tel.: +352-44.97.67 Fax: +352-45.72.01 |
| Prof. Helder Machado Inst. Clinica Geral Zona Norte Dept. of Informatics Estrada Circunvalacao(Ao Real) P-4100 Porto, Portugal Tel.: +351-2-610.08.87 Fax: +351-2-610.14.32 | Dr. Alain Maskens Health Data Management Partners Rue de Strasbourg 3 B-1200 Brussels, Belgium Tel.: +32-2-245.62.90 Fax: +32-2-245.71.59 |
| Mr. Andre Gheysen France Telecom Serv.des Telecom Professionnelles 36 rue du Comm. Mouchotte F-75675 Paris Cedex 14, France Tel.: +33-1-44.44.18.61 Fax: +33-1-43.22.16.87 | Mr. John Beresford Smith Kline Beecham Statistical Services Mundells Welwyn Garden City AL7 1EY Herts, U.K. Tel.: +44-707-32.51.11 Fax: +44-81-913.44.93 |
Web site: http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/HealthI/GEHR/
| |
 |
 |
|
|
Copyright 1997 © EHTO All rights reserved This server is the only official EHTO WWW knowledge repository. Mail suggestions to: webmaster@ehto.org |