Hi Gerard has raised other issues - there are names for age-ranges or phases such as adolescence, neonatal, toddler. It may be too much for us to deal with but age is certainly not just a number - you just have to ask the mother of a small baby - it has units like days, weeks, months.
I think Gerard missed the point of post-conceptual age - it is the time since conception and if a child is born very early, remains the basis on which dosing and milestones are based - sometimes for years after birth. This was raised as a key issue in systems for paediatricians. So I was wondering if we should model a class specifically for date of birth.....which handles date of birth and age as a function, and which takes arguments like date of conception, date of mothers LMP, Expected Date of Delivery and stores the normal gestational birthdate as well. The class then has a feature called post-conception age as well. The advantage is that we could even deal with things like 'post-natal' as a function (actual birth to day 28) and other phases in future if appropriate. It would mean that in family history you could enter 'young adulthood' as an age which might be better than guessing 22. Further, I think in our DateTime class we should store text as well as the date if people want - this would allow us to store "4.30 yesterday" if a transcription tool wanted to - and the actual date time. This can make observational data much easier to read when scanning back. It also means that we can deal with almost impossible fuzzy times like 'last night' in some reasonable fuzzy way without losing the key information. In our timing specification for workflow the same will have the same issue ie we may need the text as well as the computable data - three times a day might be at 08:00, 16:00 and 00:00, but it is a different instruction than 8 hourly (where there is no flexibility on spacing of doses). Thats enough for now...but I am thinking of putting a change request together if there is enough interest. The DateOfBirth issue will win a lot of friends in paediatrics...they are really concerned that their absolute requirements are never addressed in systems! Cheers, Sam Any more thoughts? Sam b.cohen wrote: > This is actually a 'type refinement'. > You already have a type 'number' whose instances are values that may be > operated > on and stand in various relations, particularly ordering and equality. > Now you want to refine it so that two instances of the refined type with the > same 'value' are not necessarily equal. > The main question that must be asked in these circumstances is: > Will the definitions of the operations and relations in which the new type is > to > participate violate any of the definitions that applied to the old type? > If so, then all instances of usage of the old type must be reexamined and > brought back into line. > This is known as the 'frame problem'. > Good luck. > > Quoting Sam Heard <sam.heard at bigpond.com>: > > >>Tom and others >> >>The idea of age as a complex notion - post-conception, gestational (LMP) >>ie it can involve pre-birth periods - even well into life. This apperas >>to be important for decision support. >> >>I wonder if we need to model this as an archetype for demographics - but >>it needs to be in the EHR - age crops up in lots of evaluations >>(problem, family history) so we might need to have it as a formal TYPE! >>That is - we can use it consistently in various settings. >> >> >>I would argue that gender is of the same nature - with social gender, >>physical gender and genetic gender as the key concepts. >> >>No doubt there are others but these two are worth thinking about carefully. >> >>Sam >> >>- >>If you have any questions about using this list, >>please send a message to d.lloyd at openehr.org >> > > > - If you have any questions about using this list, please send a message to d.lloyd at openehr.org
