Hi,
What are the reason why we should specialize as opposed to creating new archetypes? Does it bring any advantages in querying? Can we use wild cards in aql to represent all specializations?
In understand that they help keep the closely related clinical concepts together and make it easy to manage them. But does it also offer any advantage in app development and run time as well?
regards
Hi Dileep!
This is a good question, and one that we often struggle with: To specialise, or not to specialise?
Generally, we only specialise when there’s a close but not quite complete alignment of information requirements between two adjoining concepts. You can indeed query to match a parent archetype and its specialised children, and this is one of the major reasons for specialising vs just creating a similar concept.
Regarding managing archetypes, it’s actually harder to manage specialisations now. This is because in ADL 1.4 a specialisation contains a full copy of the parent archetype, and not just what’s changed. This means that any changes in the parent needs to be manually propagated to its children. This is changed in ADL2, so when we make the switch to govern archetypes as ADL2, this will be much easier to manage. 
Can someone please provide an example AQL that queries the specialized archetypes along with the parent ones?
Also, @birger.haarbrandt does EHRbase support this?