Subject: Disaster Management medical info HL7

From: [email-masked] (Dan Kolis)
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 10:27:57 -0400

It was said by [email-masked] earlier today:
>There has been many disaster happening in the past, like in Turkey, or
>like in Taiwan earthquake where a submarine cable was cut. I think it is
>time that the Internet become serious and reliable and that the IETF
>work on internet and disaster to ensure absolute reliability for
>emergency services which was not the case for the Vanderbilt Medical
>Center for example. Can you trust your life on the Internet succesfully
>delivering a piece of information or at least telling you that it was
>successfully delivered or not?

Dan K says:
Here in Ontario, Canada in principle there is a socialized medical system,
so in theory there should be lots of cooperation. But through my consulting
I became exposed to the complete failure of a bizzare failed 'standard'
called HL7 for health care information. Read and weep at:

http://www.hl7.org/

Despite incredible spending and the best of intentions, there is no
information technology across institutions in health care, and it has
nothing to do either with will to do it, money, or least of all, Internet.
No one trusts what comes out of these systems. Somebody with no
understanding of computer science started this thing and in the absence of
logic, its the only game in town.

On the other hand, the Vehicle Information Number heirarchy works pretty
good. A car gets far better information technology care cradle to grave than
a person's life, cradle to E.R.

Anyway: I agree Internet technocrats should *try hard* to make it the
ultimate 24/7 socket-to-socket system and build protocols than are 1E99+
perfectly reliable. Cryptologically sound, resource efficient, tracable,
robust, etc.

But some of the baggage from the human experience means lots of things still
won't work right.

Want to email a X-ray to Mount Sinai Hospital in Baltimore to catch up to
some smashed up human being sent there in a vehicle?

http://www.lifebridgehealth.org/sinaihospital/

try to find an email adress; (no standard for any of this).

Hmmm didn't make the first couple WWW pages. Hey! But 'Fundraising' did!

Its all about priorities. I suppose you could try postmaster and they could
print it out, tape it together, and wander through the building.... If there
not out snowboarding.

PS: there is a perfectly explicit, tested protocol to encode and decode the
image, but no way to figure out to which human being it applies.

Maybe technocrats should consider the RFC, BOF's etc as organisational
elements are important gifts to the normal badly organized world and spread
these techniques better?

I'm rambling, sorry.
Dan

---

From: Franck Martin <[email-masked]>
Date: 12 Sep 2001 14:57:18 +0000

There is an excellent book from Richard Heeks (UK) on the Government and
the Information age. I don't have the ref with me, but you should easily
find it on the net...

Also, the George Pompidou Hospital in Paris, has been fully
computerised, then humanised, and now they claim it works. I don't have
pointers. I tried to look for pointers but couldn't find any. I don't
have much bandwidth so if someone can...

Cheers
[email-masked]