Declarative Health: cityEHR
John Chelsom
Seven Informatics Ltd
Seven Informatics LtdA multi-billion pound project to provide a national distributed patient-record system for the British National Health Service failed. One person, John Chelsom, recoded it using declarative techniques, and it now running in several hospitals.
Dr. John Chelsom has worked for over 30 years in the field of Health Informatics. He qualified with a degree in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford and a PhD from City University, London, where he studied the application of artificial intelligence in medicine. In 2010, he started the Open Health Informatics research programme at City University, London, looking to address the causes of failure of the National Programme for IT. This research led to the development of the open source cityEHR – an ontology-based health records system, based on open standard, interfaces and development practices. cityEHR is now deployed as an operational EHR in several hospitals in England and is used for teaching students in health informatics.