Health Level Seven. Retrieved from WWW 10/09/2002 <www.hl7.org>.
2.
National Health Information Management Advisory Council (2001). HealthOnline: A health information action plan for Australia, 2nd edn. Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra.
3.
National Health Information Management Advisory Council (2001). Setting the standards: A national health information standards plan for Australia. Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra.
Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine. Retrieved from WWW 10/09/2002 <www.snomed.org>.
6.
That there are interoperability issues is without doubt. Within a hospital there is often difficulty in agreeing on what constitutes a ‘patient’ particularly when it comes to linking up different computer systems. The US Army allows five options for gender, as another example. Getting clinicians to agree on what clinical concepts mean can prove to be a similarly difficult task at times.
7.
If my computer ‘knows’ that “cough variant asthma is a type of asthma”, then it can prompt me with an interaction warning as I write a script for aspirin for a patient where I have previously entered “cough variant asthma” as a diagnosis. This is because the drug/disease interaction checker is looking out for all ‘children’ of the ‘parent’ concept “asthma”.
