[TriZPUG] [Fwd: [Zope3-Users] Python/ZCA Healthcare Project Announcement]

Thu May 22 16:53:48 CEST 2008

Thanks for posting this.  I'll look it over carefully.

Rob

On Thu, 2008-05-22 at 10:12 -0400, Chris Calloway wrote:
> I think this will be of interest to our very many bioinformatics folks 
> in TriZPUG.
> 
> -- 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Chris Calloway
> http://www.secoora.org
> office: 332 Chapman Hall   phone: (919) 599-3530
> mail: Campus Box #3300, UNC-CH, Chapel Hill, NC 27599
> 
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [Zope3-Users] Python/ZCA Healthcare Project Announcement
> Date: Wed, 21 May 2008 14:28:56 -0300
> From: Tim Cook <timothywayne.cook at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: timothywayne.cook at gmail.com
> To: Zope3 Users <zope3-users at zope.org>, python-list at python.org, 
> python-announce-list at python.org
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> I apologize for the length of and the cross posting of this announcement
> in advance but I believe it will be of value to you if you have ANY
> interest in the healthcare IT field.  Even if you do not have interest
> now; you may well after you realize the staggering growth that is
> occurring in this sector.
> 
> The healthcare sector is a very complex information management space.
> Healthcare IT applications are notorious for their lack of real
> interoperability.  This of course increases the overall healthcare costs
> due to lost and/or missing information.
> 
> While the rate of adoption of IT in direct patient care scenarios has
> been slow in the past; it is expected to increase dramatically over the
> next few years.  A recent study shows that there will be a demand for an
> additional 40,000+ healthcare information technology workers IN THE US
> alone: http://medir.ohsu.edu/~hersh/hit-workforce-hersh.pdf
> 
> The current situation for funding healthcare IT projects is that
> agencies will have a specific healthcare information management need and
> can only fund for that project. Examples are; a diabetes registry or an
> AIDS treatment tracking application.  The result is that they get the
> application that fills that need but the information is in a specific
> format for that project and is, more often than not, incapable of being
> shared with any semantic meaning with any other application.  Can the
> business of healthcare IT continue in this way?
> 
> While there has been much work done over the last 40 years on healthcare
> IT standards, we still aren't ahead of the game on any major scale.
> However, a core group of people have been working for almost two decades
> with a primary principle of 'implementation'.  Basically, if it can't be
> implemented then it doesn't work. A history of their research and
> development efforts is worth the quick read:
> http://www.openehr.org/about/origins.html
> 
> 
> Implementation is already proven in an opensource Eiffel reference
> implementation as well as an opensource Java implementation of the
> Reference Model.  There is also a significant C# commercial
> implementation by Ocean Informatics
> http://oceaninformatics.biz/CMS/index.php
> 
> These are complimented with various opensource tools for working in this
> environment (see the Software link at http://www.openehr.org ).
> 
> The Python/Zope/Plone community will be very familiar with the concepts
> of two-level modeling that is represented in the openEHR specifications:
> http://www.openehr.org/releases/1.0.1/roadmap.html In a nutshell, the
> openEHR specs. define a very broad, core reference model, that is
> constrained by a knowledge model (called archetypes).  Any
> implementation of the reference model knows how to deal with the
> structure of an archetype and therefore information expressed in an
> archetype instance can be exchanged between applications.
> 
> These specifications are becoming more and more widely known. In fact,
> the Archetype Definition Language (ADL) is now part of a CEN (European)
> health record standard and is an ISO candidate.
> 
> As you may have noticed, there is a non-profit foundation established to
> care for the IP and insure that it is and always will be open. The
> openEHR Foundation is open to membership by other organizations. In
> fact, the Python or Zope foundations could easily become an influential
> member. There are also governance processes in place to vet the changes
> in the specifications.
> 
> The project that I am announcing is the Open Source Health Information
> Platform (OSHIP).  I (as others) have tinkered with Python/Zope/Plone
> over the past several years in healthcare applications.  These have met
> with mixed results mostly due to the same problem; lack of
> interoperability (search SourceForge for more info).
> 
> The concept of OSHIP is that it can be an application framework for
> interoperable healthcare applications.  This should be especially
> appealing to governments and funding agencies worldwide. OSHIP operation
> is envisioned as taking the archetypes expressed in ADL and store them
> in an Archetype Repository as Python objects.  These instances are then
> available to developers to use in healthcare applications.  Knowledge
> workers can create/edit the ADL files (using existing opensource tools)
> to create whatever knowledge model may be needed for a specific
> application.
> 
> The current state of OSHIP is that I have entered the specifications as
> ZCA interfaces and basic implementations.  But as I said, I am a
> 'tinkerer'.  I need your help in evaluating this basic implementation
> and fleshing out the classes according to the specifications.
> 
> The functioning components already include a parser for the ADL files
> and an (almost complete) object builder to store these in the ZODB for
> use by OSHIP users.
> 
> While I am now appealing to the broader Python/Zope communities for
> participation.  There is already interest in OSHIP.  There is a workshop
> scheduled ( http://www.oshipworkshop.if.uff.br )for July 21, 2008 where
> we will be spending 10 days on health informatics, openEHR and OSHIP.
> The goal is to actually develop one or more OSHIP applications as
> examples.  There is at least one PhD student that is using these ideas
> for his project.  OSHIP is already considered to be the Python reference
> implementation of the openEHR specs.  (BTW: for anyone interested there
> is a Ruby implementation underway as well).
> 
> In order to promote the widest use of the openEHR specifications; OSHIP
> is licensed under the Mozilla tri-license
> http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/boilerplate-1.1/mpl-tri-license-txt
> 
> If you have any interest in helping move this project ahead please join
> the developer's list at the SourceForge Project site:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/oship
> 
> The sourcecode will be placed on the openehr.org SVN server by 31 May,
> 2008. I also plan to put an egg on the SF site.  This will be 'alpha'
> level code, though I hope that we can move to a beta stage at a fairly
> rapid pace (mid July?). I do not envision that the Zope experts will
> need to do the actual manual labor of fixing a lot of this code. If I
> can get some helpful suggestions then I will gladly do the work as well
> as manage others helping out.
> 
> As an aside, one of the key benefits to this project is that the core
> documentation is already complete.  The openEHR specifications do that
> for us.  We just need to finish the implementation and some top-level
> ZCA specific docs.
> 
> Thank you very much for your kind attention to this project that holds
> such a deep passion for me.
> 
> Sincerely,
> --Tim Cook
> 
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