I agree, Vipul, that individual applications may decide (for reasons of
performance or retrieval or other implementation specific reasons) to
separate the notion of action from the notion of result of the action in
order to reduce the amount of information retrieved.
However, these separations have nothing to do with the nature of the
information relationships themsleves...Only with how to build an
application that meets additional constraints, such as speed of performance.
Dan
Kashyap, Vipul wrote:
Ogbuji, Chimezie wrote:
Dan,
I've very familiar with the SOAP model. The primary motivation
for my questions about assessment had more to do with
distinguishing an action from data that is derived from it. This
speaks directly to the problem of the 'anti-pattern' where
ontologies for medical records are built *directly* from models
that were designed with data-level concerns in mind and thus
semantically inconsistent (so called "information models").
The sense of assessment as used in this paper suggests that an
assessment is data (and thus appropriate to consider a
diagnosis), but consider that there are other senses of the word
and one in particular is "the act of judging or assessing a
person or situation or event". In the latter case, an assessment
refers to the act. I was simply trying to tease out which of
these Tom had in mind.
<danR> It is true that in traditional lab department systems, the
'data from the assessment' was modeled separately from the
'assessment action.' This is not exactly "wrong." However, it was
noted that one cannot deliver a "numeric result" without restating
the action that generated the result, e.g. serum WBC is the action
and serum WBC of 10,000 WBcells/ml is the result. In physical
sciences, it is considered good practice to always include the
methodology of the action when describing the data. Accordingly,
it is best practice in the science of healthcare to also report on
the nature of the action itself at the same time as reporting on
the data derived from the action.
[VK] It may be the case that one can model key properties that can
enable the accurate assessment of the action.
For instance, one could model things like the property being
assessed, who is doing the assessment, the qualifiers of the
assessment, etc.
The CEM approack followed by IHC seems to adopt this strategy.
From what I can see, there doesn't appear a need to model all the
aspects of an action.
On the other hand, if there is indeed a need for more contextual
information related to the action of performing the assessment, it
is probably a good idea to
model these two things separately and then link them via
approporiate relationships modeling the context, but this likely
to happen in an application specific manner.
Cheers,
---Vipul
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