Graham, I'm trying to make sense of this discussion around "computability" -- what are the kinds of things that one wants to "compute" with these kinds of countable things?
michael On 18/03/12 10:57 PM, "Grahame Grieve" <grahame at healthintersections.com.au> wrote: >Are discrete units only encountered in administrative directives? Do >you prohibit people from making observations or measurements that >include discrete units such as puffs, tablets, patches, vials, strips etc? > >why? > >HL7 does because we claim that you have to have UCUM codes >so the data can be computable. If people simply want to exchange >it in a structured but non-computable fashion... they can go to hell. >And as for computable: we insist on a ucum code, and then say >that for these discrete unit kind of things, well, you just put "1" for >countable units, and then put the effective unit somewhere else - >somewhere that no one can actually pull off in practice - because >this is more "computable". Huh? We do not make sense on this. > >So much for HL7... what's openEHR's excuse? > >Grahame > > >On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 11:18 PM, Thomas Beale ><thomas.beale at oceaninformatics.com> wrote: >> >> As Grahame mentioned on an earlier post, the question of units is >>thorny. >> Although we technical people would like to mandate UCUM or some other >> well-designed computable syntax, on its own, it won't work. There seem >>to be >> two reasons for this: >> >> it doesn't take care of the need for a displayable form of units, e.g. >>the >> computable form 'mcg' or 'ug', where as the displayable is '?g' (Greek >>mu >> followed by 'g') >> it doesn't take care of 'units' like puffs, tablets, patches, vials, >>strips, >> and other discrete delivery units >> it doesn't take care of discrete delivery units per time, e.g. '2 puffs >>/ >> hour' >> >> Grahame and others have already done a lot of thinking on this here - >>there >> are a lot of excellent examples from Linda Bird on the Singapore >>programme. >> >> The more I think about the last two above, the more I think it is not >>about >> quantities per se but about an administration directive (how the patient >> should take something). Trying to make Quantity do that kind of stuff >> doesn't make sense to me - there is obviously a Quantity to indicate the >> dose in scientific form, but another data element may be needed to >>indicate >> how (in what discrete measures) to take the medication. >> >> I would therefore expect a distinct data element in the Medication >>Cluster >> archetype rather than a re-engineered Quantity type to deal with these >>last >> two. For the first one - displayable v computable, we will need a CR to >> change DV_QUANTITY, and make it work like the FHIR Quantity - i.e. have >>a >> second units field. >> >> Some of my earlier thoughts are actually on the above wiki page - the >> concept of a DiscretisedQuantity type inheriting from Quantity, which I >> think is also a reasonable alternative. >> >> what do others think? >> >> - thomas >> >> _______________________________________________ >> openEHR-technical mailing list >> openEHR-technical at lists.openehr.org >> >>http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical_lists.openehr >>.org > > > >-- >----- >http://www.healthintersections.com.au / >grahame at healthintersections.com.au / +61 411 867 065 > >_______________________________________________ >openEHR-technical mailing list >openEHR-technical at lists.openehr.org >http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical_lists.openehr. >org
