Hi everyone,
I’m new-ish to openEHR and I’m cutting my teeth in the diagnostics domain as this is what I’ve worked in the past few years (HL7v2 primarily). I am attempting to build a test request template, based around the openEHR-EHR-INSTRUCTION.service_request-laboratory_test.v0 archetype (https://ckm.openehr.org/ckm/archetypes/1013.1.7230). I appreciate this may not be the best starting point, (service_request_v1 may be better) but I think the question still stands.
I’ve hit a conceptual barrier in that I’m not sure how to handle a request that may have multiple specific tests (eg 1:TB confirmation 2:TB species identification and 2:TB sensitivities) but only 1 specimen. One or more of these may be requested, depending on what has been already performed or is known at the requesting site.
I can see that I can have multiple ‘current activities’ (ie one for each specific test). This pattern has a child of ‘Requested specimen’, but the specimen is the same across all tests and I don’t think I want the specimen details to be required once for each test, so adding a openEHR-EHR-CLUSTER.specimen.v1 to the ‘protocol’ section would make sense to me, however I am unclear about how I can reference this from each requested test. I’ve done some searching in this forum and not found anything that appears related to this.
So, my questions are along the lines of:
Is this a reasonable approach & if so how would I refer to the common root/protocol/specimen from each specific root/activities/current activity/description/Service name/code?
Should I just accept the repetition and deal with it in the UI (yuck!)?
Have I missed the (or multiple!) point completely and I should do more reading somewhere?
Is this a question that hasn’t been resolved yet? There are other potential patterns (eg 1 test, multiple specimens seems OK, multiple tests with multiple specimens is also a rare edge case) that can happen
Apologies if this question has been poorly framed - I’m more than happy to be told to go and read an idiots guide and try again!
Many thanks
Andy