[Gnumed-devel] Demographic information service

[Tim Churches]

Horst Herb writes:
> Together with Peter Schloeffel from GEHR/OpenEHR we made a joint submission 
> for funding of a "demographic service" which is not only badly needed by 
> gnumed but by everybody else also.
> I have attached the proposal paper which outlines a few alternatives.
> I am currently adapting my "person" business objects and the data 
> entry/display panels to reflect future availability of such service.
>
> Peter and I are confident that the funding will get through, and I am 
> absolutely confident that the project specifications will require GPL 
> licensing and use of gnumed compatible programming languages and tools.

To whom did you made the application for funding? Anyway, I agree that
this is badly needed, and that existing open source projects to implement
CORBAmed PIDS services have stalled (and CORBAmed is passe anyway, although
its specs should inform all future effort). Of course Dave Forslund of
OpenEMed and the entire Brazilian health system will protest that
CORBAmed is alive and well...

The need for such services extends beyond EMRs and EHRs to population-based 
disease registers and research databases, and also to public health 
surveillance,
outbreak investigation and disaster response services. Funding might also be 
had 
from agencies concerned with such things...

Essential to such a service is an efficient and effective matching engine, 
which 
can convert (probably irregularly formatted) ensembles of partial identifiers 
such as names date of birth, addresses etc into a unique identifier in the best 
possible fashion. I mentioned this point in a paper I wrote on how to better 
organise disease registers, available at 
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2288/3/1

That paper mentions Febrl, a project to develop a state-of-the-art probabilistic
record linkage (matching) engine. As one of the Febrl investigators, I can 
confirm
that the Febrl project would love to collaborate on the development of a 
Demographic
Information Service, and on standards for the same. See
http://datamining.anu.edu.au/projects/linkage.html for details of the Febrl 
project
(actually, the project is to develop better record linakage/matching techniques,
Febrl is just the testbed, but it is intended to be a testbed with 
practical application). Note that, felicitously, Febrl is written in Python.
CSIRO have also begun to contribute to Febrl, in particular
doing some refactoring work to make it better suited for use as a Web/grid 
service. 

I suppose I'd better take another look at those turgid CorbaMed specs for 
PIDS...

-- 

Tim C

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