Dear Tom et al: This is my "de-lurking" for the list. For those of you who dont' know me, I'm a computing academic whose area of interest will be adequately characterised by my question...
I'm trying to represent the structure of "normal" values of fields in archetypes. I can see that there is of course some provision for a set of allowed values, a default value and (in quantities) min and max. I want to go further (because the information could be very useful in the user interface and to integrate with decision support). For instance, I'd like to design fairly specific chronic disease management archetypes. Without worrying whether it's clinically particularly worthy, take as a convenient example the hypertension in diabetes algorithms at http://www.tdh.state.tx.us/diabetes/algorithms/PDFfiles/HYPER.PDF. My PhD student, Sistine Barretto, has made a map of the relationship of concepts from that guideline (see http://winston.unisa.edu.au/demo/Share/Ontology.doc - and the goal here is not to get too picky about the use of the term "ontology" either). >From this analysis it falls out (unsurprisingly) that there are a set of drugs (in particular, some drug types as well as a set of generics organised into types) that are in the scope of compliance with the guideline. There are also some relevant comorbidities and various other concepts (observations and actions). How can I (should I?) represent the set of likely (in scope) drugs such that, for example, a user interface could put them as options in a menu? Furthermore, how can I relate the comorbidities and other indications for the drugs to the values for a drug name field in a specialised medication archetype? Admittedly, I'm slipping into the realm of decision support, but I think it really is simply the structure of the domain of normal values in this specific application. I'd like to use archetypes to represent this, just as a I might use them to represent the min and max of a given quantity. Is the capability all there already? If not, what's missing? Cheers, Jim Warren Assoc. Prof. Jim Warren Director, Health Informatics Laboratory Advanced Computing Research Centre University of South Australia - If you have any questions about using this list, please send a message to d.lloyd at openehr.org
