European Comission Report on ICT standards in the health sector

The European Comission has published a report (PDF) entitled: ICT standards in the health sector: current situation and prospects. The report discusses Open Source as well as OpenEHR and difficulties of HL7: ‘…the RIM documentation is
described as being “disastrously unclear”, poorly integrated with HL7 v3.0 documentation,
and inconsistent.

Under these circumstances, it may be difficult for HL7 v3.0 to establish a large user base.
Currently HL7 v3.0 is still in the early adoption phase. Without a large user base, this
standard is rendered ineffective – for the same reason that telephones can not be
effective unless there are multiple users. HL7 already has a well established user base
for their 2.x messaging standards in many countries of the world. However, since HL7
v3.0 is not compatible with v2.x, this user group must be re-established. Convergence
with Europe’s CEN/TC 251 standardisation work is under way, which may help HL7 in
this respect…’

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