“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

Alfred North Whitehead.

An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

Our job in digital health and care is

  • to use data as the foundation to our health and care services,
  • to understand how to modularise our computing and data services
  • in order to compose those modules back together in interesting ways to solve problems

We should be designing with data and composable, modular, de-coupled, re-usable, stateless computing services that can act on those data.

Together, they are the building blocks, the foundation stones of a pyramid. Each level of that pyramid reflects a higher-level of abstraction, providing more sophisticated solutions to our health and care problems.

At the lowest levels are the core foundational services such as patient identity.

At the highest levels, we will be solving our most nefarious problems, and not thinking about the low-level abstractions we already have in place.

Mark