Assessment scales provide a rich seam of frustration for developers, with their seemingly limitless capacity for arbitrary scales and quantities.
Here is a current example about which I have been asked for advice - the Borgscale (http://www.ac6v.com/karlaz2.htm). It is a scale from 0-10, so would be ideal to express as a DV_ORDINAL but includes 0.5 which makes this impossible. There are a number of workarounds but is there a case for adding some form of Coded Quantity datatype to openEHR? The primary problem is in representing such constraints in archetypes but there might be some value in simplifying integration from Snomed coded findings. *SCALE* *SEVERITY* 0 No Breathlessness* At All 0.5 Very Very Slight (Just Noticeable) 1 Very Slight 2 Slight Breathlessness 3 Moderate 4 Some What Severe 5 Severe Breathlessness 6 7 Very Severe Breathlessness 8 9 Very Very Severe (Almost Maximum) 10 Maximum Ian Dr Ian McNicoll office / fax +44(0)141 560 4657 mobile +44 (0)775 209 7859 skype ianmcnicoll ian.mcnicoll at oceaninformatics.com ian at mcmi.co.uk Clinical Analyst Ocean Informatics openEHR Archetype Editorial Group Member BCS Primary Health Care SG Group www.phcsg.org / BCS Health Scotland -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-clinical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20100420/530c10a2/attachment.html>
