I agree with Thomas. Speaking as someone who has had to help with quality control of large amounts of user entered concomitant medication data for clinical trials, ‘tablet’ , ‘capsule’, and similar are not ‘units’ unless they are associated with other reference data. ‘Tablet' is a description of the appearance of the medication, which is not useful in the context of dose units. ’Tablet’ may be useful as a discriminant between different proprietary products, if you have more details (e.g. the product name) and a database which has the dose units of the product variations.
Colin Sutton I.T. Systems Development Manager NHMRC Clinical Trials Centre On 19 May 2016, at 5:24 PM, Thomas Beale <thomas.be...@openehr.org<mailto:thomas.be...@openehr.org>> wrote: Hi Gerard, they actually could be, but whenever this discussion comes up, no-one proposes it. I'm not sure if I would either, because these arbitrary units are still not computable in general, but 'dose units' can be made computable but only with some extra data fields, i.e. you need both the quantity of dose in 1 tablet/capsule etc, and also number of tablet/capsule etc. So the structural model is different anyway. I think the other problem with using UCUM arbitrary units is that people / orgs want to control the names of medicinal delivery products ('tablet' etc) in a terminology, which is reasonable, but doesn't fit so well with UCUM. - thomas On 19/05/2016 08:11, "Gerard Freriks (privé)" wrote: Thomas, All are Units of a different kind. SI defines: Units of Measure, and Units of Quantity in the scientific domain. There are also Units of Time: minute, hour, etc. When I think of tablets, capsule, etc. we will call these Units of Medicinal Product Dose. Isn’t in UCUM this an example of Arbitrary Units? 3.2 ARBITRARY UNITS §24 arbitrary units ■1 Arbitrary or procedure defined units are units whose meaning entirely depends on the measurement procedure (assay). These units have no general meaning in relation with any other unit in the SI. Therefore those arbitrary semantic entities are called arbitrary units, as opposed to proper units. The set of arbitrary units is denoted A, where A∩ U = {}. ■2 An arbitrary unit has no further definition in the semantic framework of The Unified Code for Units of Measure ■3 Arbitrary units are not “of any specific dimension” and are not “commensurable with” any other unit. Until version 1.6 The Unified Code for Units of Measure has dealt with arbitrary units as dimensionless, but as an effect the semantics of The Unified Code for Units of Measure made all arbitrary units commensurable. Since version 1.7 of The Unified Code for Units of Measure it is no longer possible to convert or compare arbitrary units with any other arbitrary unit. §25 operations on arbitrary units ■1 Any term involving arbitrary units, is itself an arbitrary unit and is not comparable with any other arbitrary unit or term. §26 definition of arbitrary units ■1 Arbitrary units are marked in the definition tables for unit atoms by a bullet (‘•’) in the column titled “value” and a bullet in the column titled “definition”. Gerard Freriks +31 620347088 <mailto:gf...@luna.nl>gf...@luna.nl<mailto:gf...@luna.nl> _______________________________________________ openEHR-technical mailing list openEHR-technical@lists.openehr.org<mailto:openEHR-technical@lists.openehr.org> http://scanmail.trustwave.com/?c=1688&d=nuq91wXdsw3fdrcy_RKYOroV-0psr7BFxYHw4b5Mdg&u=http%3a%2f%2flists%2eopenehr%2eorg%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2fopenehr-technical%5flists%2eopenehr%2eorg ##################################################################################### Scanned by MailMarshal - M86 Security's comprehensive email content security solution. ##################################################################################### ________________________________________ IMPORTANT NOTICE: This e-mail and any attachment to it are intended only to be read or used by the named addressee. It is confidential and may contain legally privileged information. No confidentiality or privilege is waived or lost by any mistaken transmission to you. The CTC is not responsible for any unauthorised alterations to this e-mail or attachment to it. Views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, and are not necessarily the views of the CTC. If you receive this e-mail in error, please immediately delete it and notify the sender. You must not disclose, copy or use any part of this e-mail if you are not the intended recipient. ________________________________________
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