For us, medical expression boils down to triples, simple subject-predicate-object statements …

    The problem is Hypertension
                   of-patient "Joe Smith"
                   recorded-on 2011-10-21
                   diagnosed-by "Dr Fred Jones"

… one triple after another, capturing a patient’s health, and so a key metric for us is how many triples does a typical patient get? Without a figure, we can’t know how big… Read More »

VistA, the EHR of the Veteran’s Administration (VA), is available to all-and-sundry, thanks to the freedom of information act (FOIA). Anyone can download, what is arguably, the most widely used, enterprise-grade, EHR in America, and use it for free. Obviously any hospital considering a new EHR should give it a once-over.

The VA presents VistA as a set of packages… Read More »

Most enterprise quality EHRs sport kill-you-if-I-tell-you, data access interfaces. And that makes commercial sense: make data easy and pleasing to enter, but make it hard, or at least costly, to get at later. There’s one conspicuous exception: VistA, the Veteran Administration’s home grown and freely-available EHR.

In VistA, as long as you have permission to use its query-anything interface,… Read More »